Today, we’re thrilled to share with you our updated Writing the Other logo, designed by Monica Valentinelli, and thoughts about our design process.

We began this journey last year by reviewing we liked and didn’t like about our colors, fonts, and the current design. Though it was clear that the logo represented our organization, that awareness hinged on the words “writing the other” being readable at multiple sizes. One of the issues we were having with a word-intensive logo is that the cursive letters didn’t scale well. The smaller the logo was sized, the less readable it became. This limited our ability to place the circular logo in our marketing materials for classes and for Writing the Other as an organization. Recognizing this, we refreshed our banners and class announcement images by removing the blue words from the white circle with an orange outline and sizing them appropriately. 

From here, we played around with different colors to see if they evoked an updated feel. We built palettes in the same tonal family and designed updated banners implementing gold, green, and maroon in addition to the blue and orange. Then, we also selected different gradients to flesh out this palette. This helped us firm up a limited selection of colors for the logo and retain some consistency with our existing design.

The first round of logo design reviews consisted of bold, letter-based designs using W, T, and O in blue and orange in various fonts and formats. Though some of the proposed designs were functional and did scale better than Writing the Other written out, they were not evocative. Following this, we began to implement design aspects related to writing: a pen, a notebook, and a computer screen and mouse were all discussed. Scalability continued to be a driver, and we began to review designs at different sizes (50×50 pixels, 100×100, etc.) during the overall process to assess how the core concepts of our organization were relayed in that image.

The final design draws on our desire to thematically relay what Writing the Other is all about. First, we retained Writing the Other in our original font as a design element which we’ll be using with the logo and on its own. This, for us, helps us remain consistent throughout our classes, website, newsletter, literature, social media, advertising and other marketing materials. The image itself incorporates writing, through the placement of a fountain pen nib, while evoking “the other.” The blue feed and gold nib of a fountain pen separates the black silhouettes of a white man and a black woman, placed at the same height, facing away from each other in a black-outlined white circle. We then opted to retain the blue from our previous design while updating the nib color to a complementary gold from our palette.

Combined, the new logo is a blend of what we liked about our old design and our core mission to “learn to write characters very different from you sensitively and convincingly.”

We hope you enjoy the new Writing the Other logo and a look at our design process. We will be implementing the new design over the coming weeks and, as always, are welcome to your feedback.