The Logo Challenge
We first met the Maryland Dental Action Coalition team when we signed up to be volunteer designers at the MICA Grassroots Design Fest. This is an awesome day-long event that brings together Baltimore nonprofits that have design needs with MICA students and volunteer professional designers.
They were in need of a new logo for their coalition, which works to lobby for dental health for all Marylanders. However, they’re not a Maryland government agency, which is a confusing, especially since their branding featured the Maryland state flag and colors.
Here’s what their old logo and website looked like:
Our challenge: Redesign their current brand without using teeth!
The Process
Inspiration & Information Gathering
As I mentioned, we were working together on-site at the Design Fest and their representatives had brought a bunch of samples of their current brand as well as similar organizations around the country. I did a mind map of their organization to try to get a clearer handle on things and then did some sketches. Remember this is all in a design marathon setting so we had to produce something—and quickly!
Really everyone loved the Rolling Stones tongue the best!
Our vision for the logo was to get away from focusing on teeth and move toward the ACTION part! We wanted to convey that this is a dynamic organization that’s making forward progress with dental health.
The New Logo
Here’s how the logo ended up looking after the DesignFest and a few extra hours of refinement. They still wanted to keep the Maryland colors! To Marylanders, that makes sense because we are really tied to our Maryland flag!
Once the logo was complete, MDAC then used the new design to work with their developers to make over their website. Here’s the new look:
The Reaction
“Chandra is an incredibly smart and thoughtful designer. She carefully balances the project goals, target audience, and client needs to develop strong, impactful, and highly effective visual communications—on time and on budget. It is simply a joy to work with her. I would strongly recommend Chandra to anyone looking to leverage good design to help achieve their organization’s goals.”
—Diane Teigiser, Administrator, Maryland Dental Action Coalition
Our other MDAC makeover is coming soon!
