QUIET GIVERS

Quiet Givers is a charity organization located in Boone, NC that supports citizens in Watauga, Ashe, and Avery Counties via anonymous donations to anonymous causes. As they explain it, “When you give anonymously it allows you to give without distorting the motive, which is truly powerful. Giving is a beautiful thing when it is truly about serving the person in need and not about trying to earn favor with people watching. Understanding the reality of others and responding with compassion and empathy in a practical way can be life changing for everyone involved.”

The organization first approached us for a logo and identity update. Their current logo was by no means bad, but it was reminiscent of the web 2.0 era, and definitely needed a lift. To begin, I developed a series of “sketches,” each with a different emblem and typeface. In the small amount of time allotted, I needed to get the most information from the client I possibly could, so I made sure to run the gamut of emblem concepts and font choices.

After a board meeting, they handed down their feedback, and I moved forward. They had a color preference—the blues and greens rather than the pinks—and ruled out a couple of typefaces. They also picked their two favorite emblems. So, I presented them with every permutation of font choice and symbol, and submitted it in time for their next board meeting.

After their board meeting, I was informed they had chosen option 2B, so I got to work refining it and coming up with alternate lockups for different purposes and locations. Eventually, I had a final logo for them, with six different arrangements. All were approved.

At the same time, I was informed that they wanted a full branding and identity usage guide, and I had approximately one day to put it together. Of course, that’s a severe underestimation of the amount of time and attention to detail necessary to create a legitimate brand guide, but I had no other option. I figured out exactly what it was they believed they wanted in it, stripped out what they wouldn’t have followed anyways, and six hours later, created a branding guide for them with all the essentials, explained as best I could in that amount of time.

Unknown to me at the time, this was all in preparation for a feature-heavy website redesign. As per usual, I was asked to start with a high-fidelity mockup to quickly get approval from the board so development could start the following week. Scrambling to come up with something that felt consistent with their new barebones identity I had just created just as quickly, I spent the rest of that week building potential layouts for various pages—which I’m grateful for, because usually I’m only given enough time to mock up the homepage.

This was approved rather quickly, and I begin to build the front end immediately after. After a handoff to a programmer and roughly 2 months of more work, the website went live (June 17, 2020).