Forward for Freedom
The Four Freedoms Fund, a NEO Philanthropy project, celebrated 20 years of immigrant justice work in 2023. To mark this milestone, they approached BerlinRosen to manage the PR but also the branding of their anniversary fundraising. After our copywriters named the event “Forward for Freedom”, I was tasked with creating the visual identity.
Client
Four Freedoms Fund
Year
2023
Four Freedoms Fund members and stakeholders wanted a brand that captured forward momentum, their relentless pursuit of justice, and the powerful partnership that comes from their multigenerational and multicultural work. A plus would be tying it back to their southwest roots.
I always begin my branding process by taking pen to paper and letting every single idea flow. I filled about four notebook spreads in this process, and had no idea until I was presenting options to the client that the winning logo began with a sketch from this page.
The option we moved forward with (pun intended) represents many aspects of FFF’s work over the last 20 years: movement, communities uniting and working side-by-side, the ebbs and flows of immigrant justice advocacy; it is also a gentle nod to FFF’s logo, a torch divided into four flames representing the four tenets of their work.
And as a nod to their southwest roots, the color palette is rich with deep, warm reds and golds with an accent of turquoise to create contrast.
20 years of data and a splash page-turned-website re-do
FFF also wanted some new, branded data viz graphics to feature on the “Forward for Freedom” splash page. The original scope of this project was a branded microsite with 5 designed graphics; but as the developers began wire-framing with the client while I was crunching numbers into Illustrator art boards, two things happened:
FFF quadrupled the amount of data to design
FFF was so enamored with the “Forward for Freedom” branding, they decided to adopt it as the new, official Four Freedoms Fund brand
The developers and I buckled down to churn out all of this new content before our PR team was scheduled to start redirecting press to the “Forward for Freedom” site, and we successfully launched in time for their anniversary conference.