Namada Branding

How it started

Namada was the epitome of “building a car while we drive it”. When I was hired onto the team as their lead designer all that had been decided was that we were to create some type of tool that would help social entrepreneurs and small business owners learn about the resources available to them. It was up to myself and a small team of three to dive into research and really learn about the needs of these entrepreneurs and build a tool to meet them. You can find the full story of how we built the tool itself on this case study page.

Time for a name

Once we had the general idea of what we were building, it was time to name that thing! I hosted a number of naming party sessions, starting with entrepreneurs and users of the site, to get a good idea of how they wanted to feel when interacting with it. We took this data and met as a team to generate names built around these feelings. What we came up with was an abstract name not predispositioned with meaning so that the tool had flexibility to evolve and change to meet the needs of the users without being tied to a rigid name that already had meaning such as "The Resource Navigation Tool". Ironically, the name Namada is made up of everything the site was not. It was not a map, nor a database, and so Namada was named "Na" = Not a, "ma" = map, "da" = database.

Enter Brand Strategy

The feelings and experience people expressed they wanted to have when using Namada were the grounding principles that I based the branding choices on. We heard from users that they wanted to feel welcomed and calm when using the site and to leave feeling like they just took a breath of fresh air. To evoke a feeling of welcome I chose colours that were warm and inviting. Deep burgundy, reds, oranges, and yellows all mixed together into a war deep main design element. This element I call “the wave” has lots of movement to it to reflect the idea that Namada is helping users move through their business growth journey. To evoke the feeling of calm I chose soft, rounded elements in the icons and illustrations as well as in a soft font - staying away from anything with overly sharp angles and edges. The breath of fresh air comes with using the site and the content it provides. The key purpose of the site was for users to be able to find supports and resources much much faster than a google search and we made sure to spend lots of time on the filtering abilities to help users find said resources on our site as fast as possible. With the goal that they leave the site quickly and can breathe a sigh of relief knowing there’s resources out there, they can quickly start the application process, and can get some precious time back in their day.

The brand in practice

Next came the fun part of applying the newly developed brand into marketing materials. Over the course of my time with Namada I developed pretty much every marketing material known to man, but below you can see how I applied the brand and came up with creative solutions for our business cards, promotional post cards, social media graphics, and presentation slides. I made sure each design adhered to our brand standards creating a cohesive set of materials while generating a unique application of the brand for each piece.

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We made it!

Not too long after out launch, we started to get invited to various events to promote and demonstrate Namada. After our first one we quickly realized we needed some solutions that were a bit more elevated from the plain white table cloth with one demonstration laptop. To get us started on this journey I designed a table cloth, table runner, desktop flags, a floor banner as well as some merch materials. Each item was designed with the intent to catch the eye and draw people in to our booth so they could learn more.