GiveGab Insider: Designing the Number One Giving Day Experience
At GiveGab, Design is an integral part of the Giving Day experience. Website design, logo design, and branding are all vital to a successful Giving Day. These aspects ensure trust, build brand recognition, and present professionalism so that you can get the most out of your Giving Day with a sleek and attractive site. At GiveGab, we pride ourselves on working with our partners to create a website that represents them as a brand and creates a connection with their donors.
Why is design important to a Giving Day?
Design is involved in every visual element that a potential donor will come across on a Giving Day website. From the landing page to the logo to social shares to printable materials, the design comes into play with every step. The design also builds a kind of trust between the donor and the recipient; having clear branding and an established presence throughout the Giving Day sites makes the donor more confident about who and where they are donating their money to.
What makes a great Giving Day logo?
There are three main elements to a logo: the text, the colors, and additional illustrative elements. When it comes to the text, it is important that it is in a legible font and oriented sensibly.
Legibility for the brand is super important because you do not want your viewer to have trouble deciphering who or what you are. Some have the idea to try to do creative orientation when it just causes confusion to the viewer. You want the name of your brand to be clear and concise.
Colors instantly add personality to the logo but it is important that these colors work together and don’t “vibrate”. Your choice of colors needs to be accessible, ensuring that all people can view your logo with no trouble. Our Giving Days are made up of 3 main colors (excluding white) and at some point, all three colors are used together. So not only do they need to look good together, you should be able to read the text of one color on top of the background of another.
Illustrative elements add intrigue and bring the whole logo together. Whether this is as simple as a badge style to the logo or a more intricate illustration, such as a landmark; this creates a logo instead of just colored words.
How do you create logos for organizations with established branding?
We always want to create something that our partners will love so we work very closely with them to achieve this. Through our design survey, we can get an idea of what they want as well as any necessary assets (design elements, fonts, colors, etc.) that need to be included. We also heavily research the brand or organization before we start creating a logo so we can create something that is in line with their identity.
When designing a giving day brand for a client, we want to merge their established identity with the event. For Ursinus College, they provided us with an illustration of their iconic Eger Gate that we were able to integrate into their final logo for Giving2UCDay.
What is the logo design process like?
At GiveGab, we offer logo design and branding services to our clients. Each Giving Day has a unique “personality,” and it is important to us that we capture. We have our partners fill out our design survey, ask about their preferences for their Giving Days as well as their specific needs. We research the organization, the surrounding area of the organization, logo trends as well as what the partner wants to convey through their logo.
We offer two different logo designs after our taking time to come up with concepts we think the partner would like. We then have two rounds of feedback from the partner. This includes picking one of the logos and tweaks to their final design.
“The logo process is different for each partner and how they would like to personalize their giving day. Focusing on the prominence of the buffalo in Wyoming state, WyoGives’ logo starts off with basic shapes and text with no color to focus on the overall design. The next step of the logo process includes more detail as well as crafting an enticing color palette to help brand the event. The final touches come after a meeting with the partner, who, in this case, requested an elongated face and a darker shade of orange.” -Shea Oleksa, Graphic Designer at GiveGab
The Giving Day logo sets the theme for the whole day. It helps decide on appropriate photos and social share designs that will be shared leading up to and throughout the Giving Day. Besides the visual necessity, a Giving Day logo helps people identify and support something they are passionate about; it unifies the partner and potential donors under a common cause.
Learn more about how GiveGab can help design and support your next Giving Day!
Meet the GiveGab Design Team
Mary-Kate (Right) has been working at GiveGab for almost 3 years, starting as a Junior Graphic Designer and working to become the Design Manager. She has experience in packaging, front-end web design, user experience, and both print and digital advertising. Outside of work, she draws personal digital illustrations that you can view on Instagram at @marykate.taylor and is currently learning how to code with Ruby on Rails in her free time.
Shea (Left) has been at GiveGab for a year and a half starting as a Junior Graphic Designer and recently being promoted to Graphic Designer. She creates many of the gifs and graphics for GiveGab’s social media, logos and branding for our Giving Day partners, and helps create webpages for our site. In her free time, Shea is an avid runner and loves to explore Ithaca with her beagle, Hambone. Shea also enjoys drawing and painting; you can see her latest work by following her on Instagram at @shealiens_exist!
