We’re excited to finally officially launch the new GFS logo, brand re-fresh and website. It is a reflection of both where we find ourselves and where we want to be – as a pioneering youth organisation relevant and appealing to today’s girls and young women.
Since our ‘soft launch’ to a small number of stakeholders at September’s volunteer training weekend, the overall reaction to the new look has been positive. However, a few members have raised a few questions, which we have hopefully addressed below:
Why was a branding update needed?
On average, organisations and brands update their image and identities every seven to ten years. Typically, this involves restyling a logo, colours used and visual style. In GFS’ case, there was a need to new breathe new life into the organisation and the logo and branding were looking a little outdated.
It was also important to ensure that the GFS brand identity was modernised, to appeal to a new generation of girls and young women. GFS has also undergone many organisation-wide changes over the last year or so; we’re introducing a new programme of activities, a newly defined mission and a new website. The old branding was looking a little tired and didn’t truly reflect who we are as an organisation in the present day – now seemed the perfect time to give ourselves an exciting new refresh.
Why change the shield design?
We modernised the shield to become cleaner and simplified in design. Our heritage is still important to us, which is why we added the ‘est 1875’ to the design.
Interestingly, the GFS logo has gone through a few variations and at times, dropped the shield completely. The 1960’s logo for instance, looks completely different – we’re sure it was very ‘groovy’ back in the day! We’ve had a rummage around in our archives and found the following logos being used at various stages in GFS’ history.
How did you choose the final design?
After researching current youth brand identities in both the charity and commercial sectors, we came up with a few completely original design concepts and asked for feedback from the young women in our focus group. Listening to the feedback, some of the ideas, whilst appealing to younger girls, seemed a bit childish to teenagers. The young women seemed indifferent about having a shield and recognised it was important to have an icon of some sort.
At this point in time, GFS is going through a lot of changes already, and we know that the shield is popular amongst our long-serving volunteers. We decided to keep a the shield, but gave it an updated look.
The final logo was a combination of several design elements and feedback. It was then shown to the board for feedback and ‘soft launched’ at the volunteer training weekend. Here are just some of the designs we came up with at various points:
GFS girls and young women are aged between five and 25, meaning we had the tricky task of producing flexible branding to suit a wide target audience. Our forthcoming materials for girls and young women will be designed and tailored accounting to the appropriate audience. We will continue to monitor the opinions of girls and young women over time to ensure our looks evolves and continues to be relevant. The same goes for the general public, ensuring that our look is attractive to potential donors, members and volunteers.
Why are the colours different? And what’s with the pink?!
GFS’ blue has varied slightly over the last century and beyond, however the most recent formal-looking dark blue was swapped for a more fun, striking bright blue. We’re a fun organisation and our colour palette needed to reflect this.
In our feedback for our focus group with young women, pink was an overwhelmingly popular choice, especially bright pink. We didn’t feel like we could move away from the colour blue, so a small amount of pink was used in the strapline.
There was also a concern that, especially as a feminist organisation, pink might be pandering to gender norms. Yes, pink will be our secondary colour (blue being our main colour), but we’d like to stress that not all our materials will be pink! In fact, we have a whole palette of new brand colours to use tailored to different audiences.
Will the new colours be hard to print?
The new logo colours are designed to look good on both screen and in print. There is also a white version (for printing on a coloured background) and a black version (for printing in greyscale) like the examples below. All these versions will be available to download soon.
Why is there a new strapline?
For those who don’t have prior knowledge of GFS, it wasn’t clear exactly what we do. The same goes for the name ‘Girls Friendly Society’ as very few young people understand that a ‘friendly society’ is an old-fashioned term for a group of individuals cooperating with a common aim (similar to a union). Most assume it’s a “society of friendly girls”! This is sort of true, but this in itself it a bit odd and can have unwelcome connotations. The membership overwhelmingly chose to not change our name in 2016, therefore we had to work around this accordingly with a strapline.
The ‘confidence, growth, friendship’ strapline was used as this covers our programme themes and mission statement and better explains what GFS is all about. The term ‘resilience’ was also dropped from our later designs because our feedback from young women said that the term was difficult to understand. To make our strapline more accessible, we used the word ‘growth’ instead. Growth could imply a growth in wellbeing, spiritual growth and other forms of personal growth.
Did you pay a fancy agency loads of money for the new logo?
Not a penny! We did the re-branding exercise in-house – everything from market research and concepts, to the finalised assets.
I’ve still got loads of old GFS-branded items. Do I need to get rid of them?
Absolutely not. We’re asking all volunteers to use up old branded items, and we understand the old logo may take a while to phase out. The same goes for any GFS clothing previously ordered.
We wouldn’t want to waste any resources either, but we ask that any new merchandise and materials requested has the new branding. We’ll be issuing a simple document outlining these details soon.
What do you mean by ‘beta’ website?
As with the majority of launches, there are sometimes some growing pains and adjustments to be made here and there before it is perfected. We’ve used your feedback from the old website to ensure the new one has improved usability and functionality. Over the next few months, we’ll be listening to your new feedback and tweaking the new website further accordingly to better suit the needs of parents, young women, members, staff, volunteers and public.
We’re a very small team, so the odd section might look a bit empty at the moment whilst we work our hardest over the next few weeks to populate some sections of the site. One such area is the ‘Activity Finder’ containing the new programme of activities which has been created with the help of our volunteers all over the organisation. Thanks for bearing with us – we promise it’s going to be great!