This is an identity I designed for Artists for Firefly, an exhibition and sale of works donated by leading contemporary artists including Michael Armitage, Rana Begum, Andrew Cranston, Nick Goss and Caroline Walker. All proceeds from the sale supports Firefly International – a Scottish charity dedicated to supporting children affected by the lasting impacts of conflict. Firefly International partners with local organisations in Bosnia, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank as well as among Palestinian refugees in Cairo, providing education, mental health support and peace building initiatives tailored to the needs of war-affected children.
The brief was to design a self-contained brand identity for Artists for Firefly – a distinct visual identity for the initiative that sits alongside, but does not replace, the main Firefly International brand identity. The brief suggested that the identity should feel warm, human, and artistic – rooted in the world of contemporary art and charitable purpose, without being corporate or generic. It should convey seriousness of intent alongside genuine humanity. It should not detract from the art which is the primary creative display on the website and at the exhibition. It needs to comfortably sit alongside a diverse range of artistic styles. The identity needs to feel credible in a formal setting while remaining accessible and emotionally grounded.
As the lead-in time on this project was quite tight, it was useful, as a starting point, to be given a brief that was quite prescriptive along with examples of previous identities used by Firefly International. Once I had digested the brief I generated several different proposals for the logo using typefaces that – I felt – matched the keywords of the brief: Warm / Contemporary / Artistic / Purposeful / Understated / Human / International. I made several iterations of arrangements of type that I then placed on coloured shapes – both circular and rectangular – as I felt that this offered more flexibility to place the logo on top of images etc. and allowed for maximum readability. I sampled colours from the images of paintings that I had been given to work with and created two contrasting palettes of colours, one based on blues and one based on reds.
The organisation were very clear about what they wanted and, having seen my proposals, were very quick to whittle them down to one iteration that was then developed further. Essentially typographic, the final logo is typeset in Montserrat, a Google font that allowed the organisation the freedom to use it across a whole range of outputs. The typographic arrangement is placed in a circular container – the ideal shape for Instagram profile photos. The blue colour palette was chosen by the organisation – a light blue for the background colour of the logo and a dark blue for body text.
Once the logo had been finalised I designed the other deliverables, all created to be easily updated by the team at Firefly: a square format social media frame that could accommodate images of the artists’s work; a square format typographic social media post; an A5 template for a printed invitation; and the logo in several formats for use across different media, as well as a palette of two colours defined in HEX, RGB, and CMYK. I also designed an alternative version of the logo with a different blue as the background colour but this was not used.
