The Turner Duckworth design agency recently partnered with The Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis), the Harlem-based Black and Brown-led social justice organization that educates young people, organizes with them for justice, and trains educators, to create a new visual identity for the non-profit.
Inspired by images and protest signs from the civil rights movement, as well as the organization’s history, Turner Duckworth created a new and robust visual identity to help advance the organization’s mission to challenge inequity and champion opportunity for all.
For over 25 years, BroSis has been at the forefront of justice, providing Black and Latinx youth the power to claim their history, identity and community to be able to build the future they want to see. BroSis tapped Turner Duckworth to tell the story of the organization through a new and refreshed visual identity that will take the organization into the next phase of its mission while continuing to celebrate its rich history.
“It was important to maintain the heart and soul of the current logo (and what it stood for),” Turner Duckworth Creative Director Robert Williams says. “But equally important, was to make it more digital-friendly, and surround it with a kit of parts that could flex its voice in new ways — and reach new people.”
The work of BroSis is centered around people and so the agency began there, interviewing staff, Board, youth members, and supporters of the organization to understand where and how unconditional love drives all action. Together, they identified the four legacy symbols — Positivity, Knowledge, Community, Future — as the cornerstones, and biggest untapped potential for the visual identity.
Without dismantling the logo and the legacy it upholds, Turner Duckworth modernized and unified its look and feel, creating a flexible system that adapts to various needs and audiences, whether it’s a simple social media post, reaching out to a donor, or making a stand at an event.
“The Turner Duckworth team understood the importance of our history and created the perfect synergy of past, present and future in our new visual identity that will surely resonate within our BroSis community and represent us well,” said Khary Lazarre-White, Executive Director & Co-Founder, of the Brotherhood Sister Sol.
To give voice and cadence to the message, the agency embraced a bold font and layout approach inspired by posters from the civil rights movement. The final touch was an expanded palette, better representing intersectional youth and inspired by the vibrancy of Harlem to properly express an organization informed by its past and energized by its future.
This was a pivotal moment for The Brotherhood Sister Sol. Working with a firm like Turner Duckworth was crucial as they were attentive and conscious of the organization’s history and vision for the future.