The Women’s Initiative
Non-Profit offering Counseling Services and Resources for Women and LGBTQ+ Folks in Charlottesville, Virginia
We helped The Women’s Initiative with:
Logo & Brand Design, Including Sublogos
Canva Templates for Social Media
Squarespace Web Design & Build
How It Started…
The Women’s Initiative initially reached out to VVITCH Digital in need of a visual rebrand — their organization had grown and changed since their first logo was created and they had also expanded with a couple of sub-brands that needed their own unique brand identities that felt related to, but separate from, The Women’s Initiative.
The Women’s Initiative offers trauma-informed care for women and a safe space for healing from violence for women and members of the gender-expansive community.
Their sub-brand, Bienestar, seeks to create a safe space for Latina women to find solutions to their problems by honoring their own truth.
Their other sub-brand, Sister Circle, aims to meet the unique needs of people from across the African diaspora who identify as women, in the following ways: providing culturally responsive mental health counseling and treatment through a trauma-focused lens, recognizing the unique mental health challenges and trauma created by anti-Black racism and systemic oppression of Black and Indigenous people of color, offering social support that creates a safe and encouraging space for women to engage in collective healing, engaging in neighborhood-based education and outreach to increase mental health awareness, and collaborating with community partners to increase access to historically underserved communities.
The vision for the new visual brand identities? “To feel truly inclusive, we envision our brand personified as more of a collective than an individual person, exuding warmth, a welcoming nature, and wholeness.”
Time for a Rebrand
We were tasked with providing The Women’s Initiative with a suite of brand deliverables and guidelines, all with overlapping elements between the primary and sub-brands. This included:
Fonts & Typography
Full Color Palette for Print and Web
Primary Logo For Each Brand
Secondary Logo/Brandmark For Each Brand
Website Favicon
Social Media Avatars
Social Media Cover Images
The overlap in elements between brands means that anyone interacting with The Women’s Initiative, Bienestar or Sister Circle will have a clear understanding that these brands are related to each other.
Our design team started by creating a mood board that encompassed all 3 brands. At that point, the color palette and font direction were solidified. From there, they moved on to iterating on logos for The Women’s Initiative, Bienestar and Sister Circle. The design team incorporated elements that look hand-painted to incorporate the warmth and friendliness of the organization.
The final result is 3 distinct, but connected brand identities that feel soft, approachable and welcoming.
Social Media Templates
Going into the branding process, The Women’s Initiative knew that they were in need of some additional collateral that is not included in our standard branding packages, so we recommended they bring us on for a couple of Design Days. With a Design Day, you are essentially purchasing our designer’s time. So, the final deliverables are whatever is completed within the scheduled time. Design Days require frequent and rapid feedback from clients and are best for current or past clients who have specific needs such as:
Design needs like business cards, social media templates or presentation decks
Website needs like updates to a sales page or addition of a new feature like a form
Creative needs like illustrative elements that work with your existing branding
The Women’s Initiative Design Days were allotted to creating social media templates, rack cards and a quarterly flyer.
An Updated Squarespace Website
Finally, with updated branding and a clear visual identity, The Women’s Initiative was ready for a new website! VVITCH designed a new site on Squarespace 7.1 which included an integration with Weglot translation services & Mailchimp Email Marketing.
We kicked the project off with a planning phase that included content planning and a site map as well as a requirements document that maps out every functionality and feature on the website. Then, we moved to the build phase. Because this was a sprint-style website build, we did not do mockups and instead, our design team got straight to work bringing their vision to life within Squarespace using a premium design template. For this site, we recommended the Verano template by Big Cat Creative.
While the dev team worked on building out the site, our content team worked on search engine optimization (SEO) research and prepared to optimize the primary pages for SEO. As a final step, we sent through training videos so that The Women’s Initiative team is equipped with the tools they need to manage their website. No gatekeeping here!
We are ecstatic with the finished product — an easy-to-navigate website that clearly communicated the mission and values of The Women’s Initiative and provides critical resources to their community.
