With 50-years of changemaking behind us, Alliance members and stakeholders have been working to develop the bold vision that will propel us forward for our next 50 years. You can’t put in a year’s worth of work building long-term policy platforms, a renewed strategic plan, and a case for support while keeping ISA’s brand image stagnant.
Farmers, eaters, and food system leaders across the state gathered at in-person events and online to reflect on where ISA came from and where we are headed. As part of that process, last fall we convened a stakeholder group called the Brand Stewards. ISA members, board members, and staff met bi-weekly into the winter to help paint a picture of how we wanted the Alliance to be viewed with this new momentum.
With the guidance of our consultants, Bold Bison, our Brand Stewards helped develop the refreshed look you see today. Gone are the plate and silverware, revisioned into a logo that can be a gear, the rising sun, or a sunflower – the first interpretation left up to each individual and how they see themselves fitting into the food and farm system.
Even with a refreshed look, our mission remains the same: forge a statewide alliance of farmers, eaters, and food system leaders who are empowered to transform our local food and farm system to be more just and regenerative.
Let’s go behind the scenes for a bit and take a look at the process to bring a refreshed brand image to go along with our reinvigorated vision for the future.
While working to develop our organization’s strategic plan for the next 50-years, it became clear that ISA’s communications strategies were due for an update. The last major overhaul of the ISA website happened more than 7-years ago. It’s an eternity when today’s website design is expected to be refreshed about every 3-5 years!
As it aged, the theme or design our website was built with gradually began to fail too. In order to provide you with a more safe and user-friendly experience, we embarked on the journey to find a consultant and designer who would help produce the next gen Alliance website. We picked Bold Bison for their demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the food and farm system and how other non-profits in this space operate.
Our process to bring a bold, new image to life for ISA started in April of 2024 when we launched a Request for Proposals from web design firms to craft our new virtual home on the web. We interviewed and studied proposals from more than 2-dozen firms over the summer and selected our winning designer.
Beginning in November 2024, we gathered feedback from stakeholders and interviews to begin the process of auditing ISA’s old brand image. A landscape scan of other farm and food organizations and their brand images was also helpful in directing our visions for moving forward. With a completed long-term policy platform and new strategic plan, months of work provided the guidance on how we could make our mission, values, and tone as an organization clearer.
Bold Bison designers led our Brand Stewards team through a series of exercises to help us hone in on the typography and colors we liked the best. What shone through was a consistent idea to reinforce the trust, expertise, and reliability that has been built by ISA members over the last half-century. We also wanted our new, clear vision for the future to be emboldened. Our new suite of fonts not only accomplishes that but also expands access to our content.
The font’s normal appearance above, and a blur effect simulating how the same letters might appear to someone with a low-vision condition below
Our new typography is anchored by Atkinson Hyperlegibile, a font developed by the Braille Institute specifically to increase legibility for readers with low vision. This innovative font has won numerous industry design awards while increasing readability with a diverse set of characters that are easy for the reader to differentiate even under blurred conditions.
In addition to our new typography, a refreshed suite of colors will adorn everything ISA related. From this new website, to printed materials, to ISA branded swag, a slight shift in our original hues created an exciting nod and connection to the colors of the food Alliance farmers grow all across our state. From ‘Heirloom Tomato’ to ‘Pesto’, and ‘Elderberry’ to ‘Whole Wheat’, our Brand Stewards immediately felt the connection and throughline to the inspiring work created by farmer members across Illinois.
These new pieces of imagery were then tested with numerous logo concepts and revisions to bring us to today’s refreshed look. Months of collaboration and reflection delivered a brand symbol that unifies our mission, allowing our members to see their unique contribution to this movement within the ISA brand: the wheels of systems change, a sunflower growing on a small farm, the sun representing vision for the future, or even the treads of a tractor tire.
The Brand Stewards and the ISA team are hopeful our refreshed look will allow us to reach new audiences, fundraise more clearly, and tell our collective story more powerfully as we work to grow a more just and regenerative food and farm system. We have a lot of work moving forward for our next 50-years and hope you’ll join in with us.