Defy Disaster
Branding, Web Design
The Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) is a multifaceted organization that leverages the power of the entertainment industry to raise awareness and funds for important issues. They were launching a new nonprofit dedicated to disaster relief aid and needed a name as well as a logo, visual identity, and website. YYES worked closely with EIF to create the name, logo, visual identity, and website for the initiative, ensuring it aligned with EIF’s broader mission and resonated with an audience of entertainment professionals. The resulting brand aimed to energize, educate, and mobilize supporters around the unpredictable nature of disaster response.
Client:
Entertainment Industry Foundation
Role:
Naming, Concept, Design, Animation, Video Editing, Web Design
Agency:
Challenge
EIF needed a name and visual identity for a new nonprofit that could effectively capture the full scope of its mission: proactive preparedness, emergency relief, and long-term recovery. The brand had to be distinct yet cohesive within EIF’s family of initiatives, and appeal to a media-savvy audience within the entertainment industry. It also needed to balance seriousness with optimism.
Objective
We aimed to create a compelling and adaptable brand through naming, identity design, and a launch-ready website. The branding needed to spark engagement among entertainment professionals, stand out visually, and remain flexible enough to address a wide range of disaster scenarios and initiatives.
Results
We developed a bold and motivating brand that stood out from typical disaster relief aesthetics. The name and logo reflected both urgency and resilience, while the visual system was built to scale across digital and print applications. The final product equipped EIF with a strong platform to raise awareness and quickly mobilize resources in response to unfolding crises (which 2020 promptly put to the test!).
Extensive brainstorming, collaboration, and research was done in the process of choosing a name. We wanted to ensure that the name carried the appropriate tone for the brand and that it wouldn't conflict with any existing organizations in the space. Eventually we settled on "Defy Disaster" for its confident, daring quality and the pleasing alliteration. Once we had a name, many sketches were done to explore how to represent the qualities of the brand in a logo.
A breakthrough came when we discovered that the double 'D' of the name could be turned into a symbol of two people with arms linked, standing united. The heads were incorporated into the word mark as a colon and a bold, condensed typeface finished it off. We chose a pairing of typefaces to be used for the identity materials and developed a one-color logo and icon. Neon green and black communicates the urgency of the brand as well as standing out from EIF's existing nonprofits' branding.
The colon element of the logo allowed us to expand it into a flexible extension system, for use during specific disaster relief efforts.
With branding done, Defy Disaster needed a website to serve as a hub for current disaster information and fundraising, past efforts, preparedness resources, and media coverage. The challenge was to prioritize urgent content, as well as present the same content in multiple places in a clear way. A site map was laid out to guide organization.
In order to be prepared for any type and quantity of content, we wireframed three levels of response detail pages to ensure those that had a lot of content or little content would not appear either too crowded or to be missing content.
Different modules were created for presenting the responses, depending on whether they appear on the home page or the responses page. An algorithm was included to ensure the "catch all" section at the bottom of the page did not include responses that were in previous sections.