EXPANDING ON A GLOBAL REBRAND EFFORT
The Collective Foundation was the philanthropic venture of The Collective, one of the world’s first and Europe’s largest co-living companies. “Co-living” is a form of urban housing combining thoughtfully designed private spaces with communal amenities and living spaces.
Initially, The Collective worked together with DesignStudio—the agency behind brands such as Deliveroo, to create the new identity, which comprised of a new logo, wordmark, dynamic type family, full website relaunch, and merchandise.
The Collective Foundation approached DrawHistory as its parent brand was undertaking a rebrand process. They challenged us to create a brand strategy and visual identity that would build on what DesignStudio produced with the intent to rally young change-makers to their programs. As a philanthropic initiative representing one of the world’s largest co-living spaces, we knew The Collective Foundation had an ambitious mandate on its hands—and needed its own identity to communicate to social entrepreneurs and impact investors.
Our opportunity was to identify how The Collective Foundation could leverage the momentum of its parent brand as a large corporate, then create a brand strategy specifically focused on community work, and ultimately better integrate the initiative with a whole-of-organization approach.
Convening of change-makers in London’s Old Oak
The identity permeated to digital, where we helped The Collective Foundation activate a resources and sign up portal to accompany the launch of its London Accelerator program, attended by social entrepreneurs from all over the world.
A BRAND FOR YOUNG CHANGE-MAKERS
Recognising how important The Collective Foundation’s community would be to its rebrand, we facilitated workshops after project kickoff to co-design the brand with their internal team and program participants.
This included completing additional consultations with wider groups who were addressing a gamut of issues: accelerator participants, co-living residents, impact investors and team members.
Many of the socioeconomic and environmental issues stakeholders were actively addressing became a core element of the final identity, from economic opportunity, to social integration, health and wellbeing, and environmental sustainability.
RALLYING PEOPLE TO AN IMPACT PROGRAM
Once we arrived at our final concept, we developed The Collective Foundation’s entire design system based on causes that covered the socioeconomic and environmental issues their people were actively addressing.
This included textures by what has inspired them in their mission — plants and oceans for the environment, concrete surfaces for urban structures and fur for animal welfare.
Designing the user journey
The identity permeated to digital, where we helped The Collective Founation activate a resources and sign up portal to accompany the launch of its London Accelerator program, running a gamut of user experience workshops and producing low-fidelity prototypes before launching the live WordPress build online.
A win for community
The Collective Foundation has supported 40 social enterprises, impacted over 700,000 lives through their programs and launched in three cities: London, New York and Berlin.
Project credits
Jeffrey Effendi
Angel Chen
Ynah Pantig
Chiara Mensa
Kate Shelton
Hannah Schultz
“I had a very good time working with the DrawHistory team. Even though we were oceans apart, communication has always gone exceptionally smooth – and I felt like I could count on them with anything. I also felt like we had a shared vision and I didn’t have to go above and beyond to explain myself – they just got it.”
