We Are Beloved
A simplified, clarified, and amplified Beloved Community.
The beloved community is more than just our team and our organization. The beloved community is a global vision in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. As a radical concept shared by millions of people over the course of generations, we realized it was necessary to define what the Beloved Community meant for us. What makes us Beloved Community?
With that guiding question in mind, we started the process of truly questioning what our work is, why we do it, and how we can more efficiently make our shared vision a reality.
This led us to identify a few key changes that were necessary.
We needed to make the equity audit more accessible and user friendly for our clients, and the DEI experts on our team.
We needed to make Beloved Community stand out to differentiate ourselves from other DEI firms, and the numerous religious organizations who share our name.
We needed to expand our visual vocabulary to align with the growth of our team, and our processes.
Over the past year, our team has worked with these goals in mind to simplify, clarify, and amplify the Beloved Community brand. Today, we are excited to introduce you to the new brand identity for Beloved Community.
Logo
The Beloved Community logo mark is a visual representation of our head & heart approach. This is our strategy of using data-driven research, combined with sustainable, actionable love to bring equity to your organization, and throughout your community. The logo resembles a standard illustration of a heart, while using a boxy, rounded-off form to reflect a book open down the middle.
Color
Our wider color palette reflects our mission of inclusivity, opening up brighter and more colorful opportunities for the ways we present ourselves, and organize content when discussing complex subjects.
Typography
Rubik Sans creates a universal feel across the brand. The variable sans-serif typeface improves accessibility & legibility, while reflecting the soft playful feeling of our logo’s rounded corners across all Beloved Community content.
Systems
Our rebrand is more than just a visual refresh, but is rather one part of a new, wider brand system. We had determined that the equity audit needed new life as an interdependent platform, where it would have full control to expand and grow as a core service. This new brand would live within Beloved Community, while being independently identifiable as the tool for our processes. The obvious next question was “what do we call it?”
Naming
Last fall, we introduced Awa by Beloved. Awa was created as our response to the need for a simplified equity audit process. Awa empowers your organization to assess individual and organizational DEI capacity, set priorities, and build plans for sustainable, long-term change.
When naming Awa we decided there were three routes we could take.
We could build on the Beloved Community name, reflecting our existing brand,
We could name it after an already existing idea, projecting our core values,
Or we could look towards our roots, and use the name itself as a tool to redirect the conversation around DEI from being centered on the feelings of white people, and towards the lived experiences of Black people, and other marginalized communities.
Following that third route, we decided on the name Awa.
Awa
Awa is derived from the Yoruba root word for “us.” As a community of people, working towards a shared vision of global racial and economic equity, awa was the perfect reflection of our vision, projection of our values, and redirection of the narrative.
The Awa logo mark is drawn out of the space inside the Beloved Community logo. Just as Awa exists as a core aspect of the mission of Beloved Community, the Awa logo fills the space inside the core of the Beloved Community logo. The Awa logo is built of five layers across a spectrum of colors, where each layer stacks on the other to build a singular form.
Conclusion
By working together as a system, our new brand identity is not only able to simplify and clarify, but it is able to amplify the way Beloved and Awa are experienced and perceived.
Design is only the beginning. The tools are made, and now it’s time for our team to put them to work.
Design by CARTEL Strategies