The Diverse BookFinder Rebrand
In January of 2023, I was part of UF MINT Studio, which is a student-led, faculty-supervised studio that connects design teams with clients locally and abroad. I worked for Diverse BookFinder, which is a comprehensive collection of children's picture books featuring Black and Indigenous people and People of Color. They offer a first-of-its-kind searchable database of their collection for educators and readers.
They asked for a team that could redesign their branding to grow with an expanding audience. Diverse BookFinder was undergoing an initiative to expand their audience to middle-schoolers and high-schoolers. They required a full rebrand to capture this friendly but professional identity. I worked with three designers and five stakeholders to create a full brand identity and 70-page branding guideline.
Responsibilities
Branding Logo & Icon Design Illustration Team Leadership & Collaboration Client Relations Editorial Design Brand Guidelines Accessible Design File Handoff
Client
Collaborators
Timeline
January - April 2023
Tools
Adobe Creative Cloud
Shifting The Tone for a New Audience
The stakeholders at Diverse BookFinder enjoyed the colorful branding that they had, but thought that it was too childish and didn't appeal to their new audience. There were many accessibility issues in their branding that had to be addressed, such as their colors and text sizing not meeting web accessibility standards.
Infographic of original branding
Multiple rounds of iteration and critique
We invested significant time and effort in perfecting our logo design. Our meticulous approach involved multiple rounds of drafting iterations, where we carefully considered elements such as color, symbolism, and composition. From an initial pool of over forty sketches, we refined our designs through each iteration until we narrowed it down to two strong contenders.
Decision tree walking through iterations of logo
An Accessible, Friendly Logo
We created our final branding toolkit, including the logo, the iconography, the colors, and other colorful assets. After thoughtful consideration, we ultimately decided to go with the Block Letter Logo. Its versatile design allows it to be used independently or paired with text, making it the ideal choice from our diverse range of applications.
Infographic of new logo
Seven Bold Colors
We chose an ambitious palette of colors to reflect both the audience and the diversity of the brand. Each color is web-accessible on both a white background and an off-black background, allowing a fool-proof way for anyone with the brand toolkit to make an accessible, brand-approved piece of media.
Seven chosen colors
Illustrative Iconography for the Homepage
We created four icons to demonstrate the four main functionalities of Diverse BookFinder. They are more illustrative than traditional icons to be more appealing to young audiences and being more engaging when scaled up on the website homepage.
Infographics of the primary iconography
An Enormous Branding Package
We created a 70-page master booklet that describes copy information, branding information, and the approved methods of displaying the brand we created. It combines their previous documentation of various accessibility standards with our own branding vision to create an in-depth exploration of how the brand will expand over time.
The language and organization was created with the intention that anyone could use the guidelines, even if they're new or not familiar with the brand (such as the social media interns). We printed the guideline for the team to reference any time they need to create DBF content after we finished our project.
A gif showing some pages from the book.
Below is a full overview of the booklet.
An embedded link to the booklet.
The Takeaway
Working with Diverse BookFinder has been an invaluable experience for me and my team. This experience has allowed me to exercise my ability to receive constructive feedback and work on a large-scale project that included branding, print production, client relations, and file delivery.
Feel free to see my continued work with Diverse BookFinder here.
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