We are the Evidence

The Company

We are the Evidence is aimed at shedding light on sexual assault and society’s myths surrounding it. They hope to empower, educate and build a strong community of support. The organization is born out of one individual’s personal experience in reporting her own sexual assault. Like many, she found herself conflicted with differing emotions and had a difficult time finding resources to navigate everything she was processing.

Branding Process

To get started, we asked A LOT of questions. They wanted something strong. They wanted something unique. We began crafting a mark, which, believe it or not, has its roots in a hot air balloon (their founder is fond of the balloons because of their fire within and ability to rise on their own power). The mark began as the strings between balloon and basket, and came to host a whole array of meaning.

Color was a key element in their brand, which wants to touch on all the emotions surrounding sexual assault. The warm red of anger, action, energy. The somber of deep violet and black. We found a red-violet to plant them between the warm reds and the cool violets, allowing them to veer toward different emotions simply by their use of color, especially through the use of gradients. We call it their emotion gradient. Each gradient includes 2-3 anchor colors and is used as a background or image overlay to help carry the emotional tone of the message.

We chose a heavy slab typeface as their primary, which offers strength and some level of formality. It’s called Bitter, which seems fitting—and it’s an available Google Font, which is paramount because they’ll be creating their own social media graphics.

The organization’s primary space will be Instagram, so it was important to develop a suite of templates to accompany their various post types.

Logo

The icon, reminiscent of a “W,” has multiple layers of meaning. The three negative spaces in the “W” represent a figure with their arms held high in a victory pose. The center space represents a single beam of light, to symbolize the organization’s mission of shining a light on sexual assault myths. The enclosed overall shape represents a platform for speaking out. And finally, with included serif features, the icon is somewhat roman numeral-esque—which ties to the complications involved with sexual assault reporting and legalities. Overall, the mark is strong and bold—and when paired with a heavy slab serif, it exudes a powerful position from which to strike change.