iheart

BRANDING

Getting back to basics with branding for educators

iheart’s mission is to help people uncover their innate resilience. The UK based non-profit delivers a range of innovative, highly impactful programs in schools, businesses and organizations, and directly to leaders, employees, parents, educators, children, youth workers and facilitators. With so any diiferent audiences, the challenge is making sure a cohesive brand strategy will work for all communicators.

Rhizome was engaged to help iheart get a handle on aligning their brand visuals. It was no small task. For years many people developed their own materials and communication pieces were all over the map. The first thing we needed to understand was how they were using the brand to showcase the really great messages they wanted to impart. To this end, we gathered together as many pieces as we could find out in the wild.

iheart visuals in the past
iheart visual before

An online whiteboarding workshop for our counterparts in Europe

iheart workshop
iheart workshop

We then took our findings to an online whiteboard using Miro where we could work with people in England, Scotland and Israel. We designed a workshop to help the stakeholders bring their their voices to the table. It was a fun, interactive session with lots of great input from our European counterparts to clearly define iheart’s values and personality.

A consistent and versatile logo system

Once we had our values and personality approved we got to work on finessing the logo, the type, and ensuring the corner radius settings of the checkmark were perfect and congruent. We then provided iheart with a way to use the logo in a reverse format that would show up no matter the background. The system we created utilized a left and right tag bar that would allow the logo to stand out and be consistent used across all their communications. The bars could also be animated or work as social media tags.

iheart logo use

A master brand guide delivery system for a remote marketing team

The logo system was only the first part of the visual brand. We helped iheart with their color palette which was extensive due to the fact that it could be used for teaching materials. We then created guides for how to use transparencies, elementals, photography, and concepts for social media. We then put it all in an online Airtable repository where all team members could access the assets.

iheart branding guidelines

Online examples

iheart website headers

Once we had the brand components in hand, we set to work, showing iheart how they could use their new assets across their website and in social media posts. 

The social media posts turned out great. We allowed the shapes to “uncover” the faces of iheart students and facilitators and let their testimonials shine through. 

iheart social media posts