Method Week № 9: A Brand Sprint with Kids In A New Groove
Once a quarter, Funsize closes the studio for a week to focus on one of the following themes: make, learn, teach, and experience. For Method Week 9, we focused on “make,” with the help of four incredible nonprofits.
One of those nonprofits was Kids In A New Groove (KING), where we had the pleasure of working with KING’s Executive Director, Laura Wood and Program Manager, Sarah Gómez Wauters. The Funsize team included Ben Murray, Brittany Leaning, Dina Williams, Edgar Briseño, and Madi Chatham.
We spent four days collaborating with Kids In A New Groove to give the organization an entirely new look and feel with a consistent voice and tone.
About Kids In A New Groove
Kids In A New Groove provides Texas youth in foster care with a committed one-on-one mentoring relationship through weekly private music instruction, giving students the ability to build concrete strategies for life-long success.
By creating a consistent and nurturing environment, the organization empowers youth in foster care to transform their futures through music mentorship.
Project Needs
Laura and Sarah came to us for help with creating a more consistent and cohesive brand identity for KING. The design and marketing execution for KING is typically done by volunteers, leading to inconsistent branding and messaging across all digital and print platforms.
Their goal was to improve and perfect their branding, content, and possibly merchandise in order to effectively spread their mission, elicit an emotional response from the public, and share their success stories in changing the lives of foster youth through music.
After our discovery call, we aligned on some potential deliverables:
- A complete re-brand
- Color palette refinement
- Brand guidelines including voice, tone, look and feel
- Digital marketing collateral such as social media templates
- Physical marketing collateral such as flyers
Day 1: Discover & Uncover
Kids In A New Groove needed help with a rebrand, including a logo, colors, typography, and voice & tone document. We decided to start off the week with a mini brand sprint to understand who KING is now, who they want to be in the future, and why they wake up and do what they do every day.
The Golden Circle
If you’re familiar with Simon Sinek’s famous TED Talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, you’re probably also familiar with The Golden Circle.
Spark Notes version: Every organization on the planet knows WHAT they do (the products they sell, services they offer). Some organizations know HOW they do it (what makes them special or sets them apart from the competition).
However, surprisingly few organizations know WHY they do what they do. And we’re not talking about making money —that’s a result. WHY is a purpose, cause or belief. It’s the very reason your organization exists.
So, we kicked the brand sprint off with The Golden Circle as a way to understand the organization and its motivations.
To get a sense of where Kids In A New Groove falls brand-wise within the competitive landscape, we wrote out a list of direct and adjacent competitors and put them on sticky notes on the whiteboard. The KING team then helped us map the sticky notes to where they fall on the spectrum of classic, modern, reserved, or expressive.
Who are the competitors? It’s important to consistently acknowledge, understand and evaluate who your competitors are.
What do they represent? Every competitor strives to provide their own take on a common problem and while some are lasting, some are not. How do these competitors define themselves in your space?
Where do they shine? What things are your competitors doing really well and what things are they doing poorly? Examining where each competitor falls short opens the door to finding the perfect niche for your brand.
Brand Values
This Brand Values exercise consists of putting 65+ adjectives on sticky notes and putting them on the whiteboard. The goal of this exercise is to categorize each of the adjectives within the following categories:
- What we ARE
- What we ARE NOT
- What DOES NOT APPLY
Participants put the adjectives into the section that corresponds to how it relates to the current brand or the intended direction of the new brand vision. The conversation of why each person chose certain words is where the magic happens.
The objective? Get the entire group to align on 6–10 cards defining who “You are.” These cards become the brand’s core attributes.
Kids In A New Groove Is…
Approachable, Big, Empowering, Energetic, Friendly, Inspiring, Optimistic, Trusted, Unique
Tone of Voice Dimension
Identifying the tone KING would use consistently in different situations — or types of content — would allow them to show empathy, remain on-brand, and help them connect with their audience.
We based this exercise on the work by the Nielsen Norman Group on tone of voice words, which considers four primary tone-of-voice dimensions on a scale to determine the different tones used by the brand.
Lightning Examples
We had Laura and Sarah bring up some examples of brands and organizations they liked, and why they liked them. This helped us get a sense of which logos, colors, typography, photography styles, tones of voice, and overall brand personalities they preferred.
Walking through brand examples by the end of day one helped get our creative brains flowing and set us up for success at the start of day two.
Day 2: Inspire & Define
Word Associations
We started day two with a word association exercise. The team had one minute to come up with a list of words they think of when someone says “Kids In A New Groove.” Examples of words included: music, mentor, kids, foster, groove, sound, guitar, piano, sing, give, love, and connection.
Icon Research
Once we had a list of words, we went to thenounproject.com and typed out some of the words generated to see what iconography came up. Doing this gave us ideas for established symbolism we could borrow for sketching our logos.
Crazy 8s
If you’re familiar with design sprints, you might know Crazy 8s as a popular activity for sketching UI features quickly. In a typical design sprint, the facilitator will ask participants to fold a piece of 8.5 x 11" paper into 8s. Participants will then sketch logo ideas with a fat Sharpie marker in one minute per rectangle (8 minutes total).
For logo sketches, we actually shortened the time to 30 seconds per frame to allow for quicker ideation. The reason we use a larger marker is that it helps participants not overthink or get bogged down with details; they’re forced to focus on the big picture.
Voting on Solutions
After presenting our Crazy 8s concepts, we went through another round of sketching to drill down on our three favorite logo concepts. In a typical design sprint, these are called Solution Sketches. We put our detailed sketches on the whiteboard and used stickers to vote on our favorite concepts.
Moodboards
We used Figma to come up with three different directions for the look and feel of the new Kids In A New Groove.
We organized the boards in a way that allowed for an apples-to-apples comparison. Each board included a place for typography, a color palette, logo styles, UI elements, icons, illustration styles, and photography styles.
Day 3: Create & Decide
The Funsize team spent all of day three on heads-down designing, starting with logo design. We aimed to get four quick logo concepts out to Laura and Sarah as quickly as possible so they could give same-day feedback and the Funsize team could iterate.
Logo Concepts (Round 1)
Day 4: Refine
Logo Concepts (Round 2)
The final concept for the Kids In A New Groove logo included the following elements:
- Soundwaves: Broadly about music because the foster kids can learn any instrument they like.
- Mentorship (Big & Little): The two circles are a combination of soundboard knobs with the concept of mentorship; a “big” mentor and a “little” kid.
- Heart: Because KING mentorship goes beyond music; it’s a chance for kids to connect with someone consistent, even with turbulence and home changes within the foster care system.
Brand Guide
Based on our brand sprint exercises from day one, we came up with some goals and principles for Kids In A New Groove’s tone of voice.
Every piece of content KING publishes aims to be:
- Inspiring: Music is contagious and contains energy, so do the words used to talk about KING.
- Unique: KING leans into its own way of doing things; they’re not afraid to speak their truth and communicate the importance of their message.
- Optimistic: Foster children have enough negativity to deal with on a daily basis; Kids In A New Groove exists to provide hope and guidance for its kids.
- Friendly: KING accepts people from all walks of life and understands that music and friendship are not exclusionary. They are approachable and easy to work with.
- Trusted: Getting involved with KING is a sure bet; they know how impactful their work is and exude confidence in their abilities to change the lives of foster children and mentors for the better.
Marketing Materials
Kids In A New Groove is run by volunteer work, so we wanted to make sure that in addition to a logo and brand guide, we provided Laura and Sarah with some tangible marketing materials, including templates that they could customize.
We updated a brochure and a flyer they already had with the new look and feel and tone of voice. We also created an email newsletter template, social media templates, PowerPoint template, and some merch concepts from scratch.
Conclusions
In four days, our team was able to deliver:
- A new logo with lock-up variations.
- A brand guide with an updated color palette, typeface, photography guidelines, and a voice & tone document.
- Marketing materials including a printable flyer, brochure, email newsletter template, social media templates, and a PowerPoint presentation template.
The Kids In A New Groove team walked away thrilled with the updates made to their brand and were excited to hit the ground running with updated templates and collateral.
Funsize is a digital service and product design agency that works with inspiring design and engineering teams to uncover opportunities, evolve popular products, bring new businesses to market, and prepare for the future. Worked at by friends. Got a project for us, Let’s Chat!
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