Hello! My name is Ximenna de Leon, I am a senior graduating in Winter of 2023 with an emphasis in visual communications. For my Senior Project, I rebranded a non-profit organization my siblings and I created called “Little Lions”.
Little Lions is a non-profit organization focused on helping disadvantaged children in Guatemala. Guatemala is a beautiful country filled with people who have rich culture, traditions, and desire to work hard to better their life and their children’s lives. We believe education can truly change lives for the better. Children who master basic literacy in primary school stay in school longer, have better economic opportunities in life, live longer, healthier lives, and are more likely to have health-educated children.
Our mission is to help public primary schools receive the resources they need to teach children to read and write. Little Lions partners with other non-profit organizations, such as Child Aid, to bring needed supplies to public schools through an annual donation.
Project Goal
As part of the new Little Lions strategy, we want to target bigger businesses that want to do charity instead of targeting the general public. My services came into play in the rebranding process. I needed to create an identity that could convey trust, confidence, and professionalism while maintaining a friendly appearance.
I developed a style guide that includes:
- A new logo
- Typography options for any other promotional material
- A new set of color schemes that match the rich culture of Guatemala
- Alternative Marks
- Three different social media icons
Logo Process
My major challenge for this project was to design the logo. One that could be interactive, formal and professional. I knew I wanted to keep the lion head as part of the main logo design but first I needed to understand what does a lion head looks like simplyfied. I started by sketching some ideas and then, making them in illsutrator with basic shapes.
I had this idea of incorporating other elements within the lions’ mane as you can see in the first iterations. I realized that wasn’t really working because the name of the non-profit is literally Little Lions, so I started making lion cubs heads and I even considered a full body lion cub at some point that could interact witht the logo name.
After some feedback I decided I was going to use one of the lion cub head iterations I already had and tweak it a little more to make it look better.
When I went to try it out on the website it was hard to distinguished what the icon was because the it was just the outline. Therefore I decided to offset the path and added a base color.
Website Proposal
Based on the style guide I wanted to create a website proposal for future Little Lions donations so that we could provide interested businesses with a platform in which they can easily educate themselves about the cause, donate and get updates about current donations.
Website Wireframes
Wireframes are always my way to go when starting with websites. It gives me and idea of how many elements I want to incoorporate such as illustrations, icons, photography, or mockups.
Even if I don’t end up using the exact layout I would always refer back to it to get inspired whenever I hit an end road. As you will see in the next page.
For Little Lions the main thing with the website was to have a platform in which donors could educate themselves about the cause, see the progress of an ongoing donation and be able to donate directly through the website.
Website Final
I figured three main pages will be good to start with in the meantime, with three poweful call to actions first, to donate, second, to sign up for notifications or follow social media, and third spread the word about the cause on their social media of any other form of communication medium.
The three main pages includes: 1) The Home page, which would serve them as their about page for users to get to know who Little Lions is, what is the main thing they do and why they do it.
I designed this page as some sort of journey for the user. Where they can experience some empathy towards the children Little Lions is helping, backed that up with some quotes and finally invite them to act.
2) Reach and impact page which includes a summary of past donations and what was the impact that donation caused.
3) Finally, the “Get Involved” page which includes a chart with information about how the donation is doing.
Icons
Photography Credits
Learning Outcomes
I really enjoyed developing the branding for Little Lions, I feel that this is my way to give back to a comunity that has given me so much.
Through this project I relized that my passion relies on developing original, meaningful, and cohesive business identities and tied them to their mission and vision. This is something I see myself doing as a career. If you are interested to see more of my work, please visit my design and photography portfolio. I’m excited to see what the future holds.