Our journey from narrative to website

Last week we shared with you how we evolved our brand story and our narrative because we felt that we were wearing a coat that didn’t fit anymore. There is nothing wrong with our current coat. It is a sensible green coat that demonstrates trust, expertise and clarity. But we had set our heart on a Dot Project version of the ‘Technicolour Dream Coat’.

In this blog we will focus on how we chose the right fabrics, patterns and colours for that new coat… How would our new mission, vision and brand narrative really come alive?

All of us at Dot Project have come into the co-operative holding years of very diverse experience. This has always served us well and rather than building traditional departments, our ambition has been to empower all of our members to step in and out of roles that support the growth of our organisation. We have experimented with ‘circles’ (we’ll speak to our experiences in a later blog) and at the time, this visual identity project fell to our marketing circle, stewarded by Sadaf. However, we quickly realised that this work went beyond marketing, for it captured the essence of the entire organisation.

Sadaf invited everybody in and steered us through the messy process of writing a brief and choosing a design partner who would help us to visualise our new coat. The thing is, the challenge of choosing a design partner is not so much to decide who to go with but the agony of deciding who not to. We had wonderful conversations with design agencies and were frequently blown away by their smartness, creativity and the quality of work. Like you would gently guide children who want to play with all the toys, Sadaf guided us through a kind and concise process that led us to working with Francesca and Fran at AndGood agency.

Any good visual identity work connects past dreams and future aspirations. In last week’s blog we spoke about the Original Myth, the founder story of Dot Project. Little did we know that at the beginning of Dot Project there had always been a shade of technicolour.

Annie and Cat shared with us the very first Dot Project logo development back in 2016. They also shared that at that time they got advice to ‘tune it down’ to fit into the dominant narrative of decisiveness, efficiency and clarity. Especially as Dot Project was launching as a women-led co-operative. This blog is the space to elaborate on this, other than to state that Dot Project will promise never to follow any advice again that is asking us to ‘tune it down’, especially not if that advice comes for a dominant system that we yearn to challenge benevolently.

Together with Fran and Francesca we explored different routes and using Miro, we saw our exploration grow steadily. Half way through the process our miro board looked like a pattern cutting room, full of opportunity, playfulness, colours and structure.

We worked our way through mood boards, through associations and discussions about colours and shapes. AndGood gave us so much space to be part of the creative process — it was empowering and simply joyful.

Once they had managed to get all of our dreams out of our heads, they started their work of distilling, sense-making, pattern-spotting and translating all of this into design concepts. The next time we saw them they shared three design concepts with us; the decision was easy and unanimous. Much like walking into a favourite clothing store, to looking through the rails and to seeing ‘the one’. The coat that had been waiting for us and that we had been waiting for — the moment felt almost magical.

In parallel we had been working with Chrissie (Inkpot & Pen) to develop a suite of illustrations that would work with our newfound visual design. We learned that making decisions on illustrations was hard. Especially when these illustrations should communicate how we work and how we think about always connecting Tech and Teams.

What saved us was the trust that we had developed with each other in our sociocratic decision making process. We trusted our ‘range of tolerance’ and tried hard to stay away from discussions on whether or not we liked the illustrations we were presented with, focusing instead on critical concerns among the cooperative. We also learned that, more often than not, the illustrations we struggled to grasp, derived from briefs of a lesser quality. Writing good creative briefs takes care and time.

Now that we had all the components for our dream coat, it came to the artistry of stitching it all together. For us that predominantly meant designing a new website and when we started the process, we made two conscious decisions:

1. We would do it in house with the support of Matt and Holly, two of our wonderful associates.

2. We would go slow and easy, acknowledging that we are building this website and visual identity whilst upholding our usual activities. This included delivering support programmes, convening and connecting other actors within the digital resilience community and wrangling life in general (including a move from England to Argentina for Cat, one of our Members and Co-founders!).

Fast forward and it is Tuesday, 30th May and we will be launching our new website and our new branding this week. Keep an eye on our Twitter and linkedin to follow our journey to finding our visual identity and if any of the above makes you want to share your experiences, drop us a note at hello@dotproject.coop!