Strategy & Brand Positioning
We built a dynamic brand strategy for Sunrise, signaling a new era for their organization.
Since 2018, Sunrise Movement has shown up through rallies, hunger strikes, lobbying, and community building proving the impact of youth led movements, and now they are building communities across the country to invite more people into climate justice. A shift in brand strategy was necessary to highlight local organizing and invite Black, Brown, and marginalized organizers into Sunrise’s work.
Brand System
As new voices and perspectives emerge, it is essential to demonstrate the power, unity, tenacity, and energy that is at the core of everything Sunrise does. The brand system is built around a matrix that allows Sunrise to communicate across the different tones and audiences they need to reach.
Visual Identity
We refined and built upon the Sunrise brand to create a visual system that is welcoming, powerful, and usable across the many different organizers within the movement.
Sunrise is known for their bold and confident presence when they show up to rallies and protests. Their action art is a key element of their brand, and we utilized elements of their banners, posters, and art as a main point of inspiration. The brand showcases the vibrancy of the movement through colorful gradients, bold icons, thick outlines, and engaging imagery.
Logo Modifications
The Sunrise shield was maintained as a key component of the brand to demonstrate the battle that the Movement will continue to face. However, modifications allowed for the logo to maintain its shape, while making it friendlier, more legible, and easier to use across different mediums.
Color Palette
The color palette was expanded to include a dark green that signals seriousness while also adding some warmth and humanity to the brand. The evolution of the palette was important to create a look and feel that is youthful, energizing, and dynamic.
Image Treatments
An emphasis on hope, community, and joy allows for Sunrise to reshape public perceptions of organizing and movement building. The extent of the Sunrise community’s engagement necessitated a broad range of imagery and visual treatments to reflect the expansive organization. Sunrisers and their supporters are shown in full color and vibrant color treatments while adversarial people and events are shown in darker colors and halftone images.
Sub-brands
Sunrise continues to launch different campaigns, chapters, and projects. We worked to build a sub brand system that accounts for the existing campaigns while allowing further expression for new campaigns.
Tandem helped us tackle many layers to the question, ‘what does the future of Sunrise look like?’ Together, we built a strong visual strategy for the future of our movement that does not neglect the power of our past.
Paris Moran
Digital Director, Sunrise Movement
Website Design & Development
A youth-led movement such as Sunrise needs a strong digital presence and digital home to provide resources, tools, and engage their members.
The new Sunrise website reflects their new look and feel, bridging the urgency with vision and hope. It was built to be for Sunrise members, a place to showcase and celebrate their victories, engage and funnel in new members, and be a decentralized resource to continue their work across the country.
The website funnels new members into different levels of engagement with Sunrise. Actions and campaigns are predominantly featured to attract and engage new members, building a strong and diverse coalition. The digital home creates a place of unity and cohesion across the decentralized movement.
Handoff
Sunrise is a growing community of engaged young people working towards a better future. Together we built tools to communicate and build on their momentum for years to come.
The Sunrise brand is built to be flexible yet consistent, allowing for creative expression, art activism, and dynamic communication strategies amongst the various Sunrise members. Utilizing existing workflows, we built a deployable and collaborative system in Canva to house the brand, sub brands, and templates allowing for various levels of expression and skill sets.
Brand guidance included key points to help with decisions regarding image choice, sub brands, different communication channels, and voice and tone. Sunrise staff and members have continued to create, iterate, and explore the bounds of the brand system.
We now continue fighting for the Green New Deal with a brand guide and website that is incredibly movement friendly: dynamic, easy to share, and accessible
Paris Moran
Digital Director, Sunrise Movement
Project Credits
Client
Sunrise Movement
Sector
Movement Organizing
Climate Justice
Year
2023
Project Scope
Brand Positioning
Handoff
Research & Discovery
Visual Identity
Website Design (UI/UX)
Website Development
Project Team
Maria Arenas
Jacob Bilich
Shelby Rashap
Malavika Srinivasan
Scott Starrett
Collaborators
Dewey Digital
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