Brainfood Branding
An Overhaul for an Established Brand
Brainfood reached out to Metro Nova Creative in early August in hopes of finding a creative firm that could help them with the heavy task of rebranding their organization from the ground up. And they needed it fast and at an affordable price, considering they’re a small non-profit. Metro Nova Creative stepped up to the plate and swung. I won’t say it was out of the park, because this wasn’t an easy one shot deal. There were a million moving parts involved and a team of people all responsible for their part, both on the client’s team as well as our own. I’ll say this was an in the park homer, the ball bouncing all over the place. Off shoes, players, fans and an old beer can in the outfield. It was beautiful to watch after the fact in slow-mo.
Just as a quick intro, a little bit out about Brainfood – Brainfood uses food education to provide D.C. youth with important life skills and the motivation they deserve to guide them to success. You can read more about it here.
Step One: Logo Drafts
This first initial step is always the hardest. Coming up with a ton of logo comps that may or may not work at all. It’s the stuff that keeps you up at night. Brainfood was a major undertaking so there were major comp submissions. Here are a few of the early submissions.
So many comps…And we didn’t get our final version. But we did get an idea of how to accomplish the goal thanks to these compositions. You see, the handwritten type from above is actually my awful handwriting that I scanned in and digitally illustrated out. That gave us an idea. Since the organization was named by a student’s suggestion “Brainfood” I thought we could continue that idea in a way. I had the core group of employees from Brainfood all right out the name. I then used portions from a couple of different samples and the same practice of scanning and digitally illustrating to build out the new logo. That, combined with different icon elements gave us our final! And it’s stunning.
Step Two: Final Logo Submission
The D.C. stars and bars are mimicked using kitchen utensils. The hand written type came out playful enough to represent the company’s spirit, but commercial enough to stand up in a market like the Washington D.C. area.
There’s a standalone icon for social media.
And then a sub brand for the Homegrown project which is a continuation of the Brainfood program that teaches students the business side of food. Here’s some more information about that.
Step Three: The Website
After we had our final logo, we moved onto the next portion of this re-brand. The website. Brainfood’s website was outdated and unfortunately had started to fail, as features were becoming obsolete and plugins were failing because there weren’t current updates for the code. There were also way too many individual pages on the site. Users can be overwhelmed by content on a site and leave before they find what they needed in the first place. It’s important to keep the amount of pages to a minimum and to make sure people can get where they need to go within two clicks.
Here are some screen shots from portions of the project. You can view the site live here
Step Four: All of the Things
We also got to design and print all of their business cards, product labels, embroidered chef jackets and screen printed gift bags! They came out great and really give an idea of how much we can do for our clients!
Brainfood’s Business Cards show that great brand color we came up with.
Up next we created the signage for Homegrown’s Union Market location, where you can find some of their awesome snacks.
And here’s a look at the packaging we designed and printed for those snacks.
You can take home your snacks in this great re-usable bag we created.
And the Homegrown team will make more snacks to fill the shelves in their new embroidered chef jackets!
Thanks for checking out our Brainfood rebrand project! It was an amazing experience working with the staff and I look forward to much more in the future with Brainfood.
