The Challenges

Since its start in 2008, SSI has positioned itself well with the key government and non-government partners and stakeholders. To further strengthen its organization's mission and goals, SSI wanted to strengthen their communication strategy by revamping their logo, a re-design of their information pamphlet, and designing and building an official website. With these improvements SSI hoped to reach out to both a wider and targeted community and to enable the exchange of information to better equip potential advocates, partners and stakeholders.

The Solutions

Logo
Their current logo, a native tree of Azerbaijan, represented nurturing and protection. It was clear that they had spent some time on the concept of the logo but the execution did not quite represent all they had hoped. They all agreed the logo should represent growth, protection, equality, and strength, but some were in favor of a more literal representation over the more metaphorical tree. After looking at the three different logos I created, the staff agreed they wanted to stay closer to their original tree logo and avoid any graphics of children. The new logo reinforced the concepts of equality, protection and nurturing. The typography was changed to ensure the logo could translate in English and be consistent in its look. A serif font complimented the curves and lines of the tree. The final result was much more sophisticated, refined, and consistent.

Website
We discussed the goal of the website and the users they envisioned would use the site. Through discussions, SSI collectively decided they wanted to reach a broad audience on both a local and national level including potential sponsors and partners down to local families and educators. After we discussed who would use the site and what information they would seek out, we spent time breaking the site into sections and talked about how each section would provide the appropriate information. I chose Wordpress as a content management system as it is the most widely used CMS with a huge support forum and extensive codex. I built a custom theme in Wordpress with a number of custom functionalities for SSI. My main focus when developing this site was not just about the front end, but very much about making the backend as easy to operate as possible. The final site provided SSI with a strong professional online presence that presents very specific information to a targeted audience in an aesthetically thoughtful manner. It was built for longevity and sustainability for SSI and they are able to add, edit, and remove nearly all of the information on the site. The site is also highly integrated into the social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter enabling SSI to reach an even broader audience in an extremely efficient way.

Pamphlet
SSI had an information pamphlet made awhile back but unfortunately they did not have design resources. They had an standard letter size pamphlet that gave a brief description of each of their projects, but it did not effectively reflect the style of the new site and their overall identity revamp. The final result was a redesign of the original pamphlet that focused on organizing the information in a more thoughtful way and adding hierarchy to the text. I maintained the energy the colors provided in the original, but in a way that did not distract from the information but rather added to the organizational hierarchy. The pamphlet will be in both Azerbaijani and English.