Jess Lilley: On Branding For Women’s Safety
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
By Jess Lilley, Founder and Creative Partner at creative impact agency, The Open Arms.
The creative industry is built on the belief that being seen is the dream. We relentlessly optimise for visibility, figuring a brand nobody notices is one that isn’t working, starting with the sign above the door. For a family violence refuge, that sign is an impossibility. So how do you put safety at the heart of your brand without playing it safe?
This was our strategic and creative challenge after being appointed to help find a new name
and visual identity for one of Australia’s longest-standing refuges. What was then Georgina Martina Inc. has been providing family violence support for over 50 years.
For much of that time they prized their anonymity, a position that was central to the strong feminist principles the organisation is built on. But in today’s landscape, while still needing to prioritise safety above all else, they also need to be able to signpost their work, their legacy and their leadership – so they can build on their lifesaving impact. All while saying to the person arriving at their door: you are in the right place, you are safe with us.
And so Courage Collective was born. A new name reflecting the courage it takes for victim-survivors to leave, to speak up, and to rebuild their lives, while also representing the fierce advocacy practiced throughout the organisation in a nation gripped by a family violence Crisis.
The second part of the challenge was bringing the name to life. While standard design solutions might represent the accumulated wisdom of decades of brand practice, they can cause harm when designing for people navigating family violence. A photograph of staff, a resident, or anything that can identify a person or location will compromise safety. Any other type of photography can be misleading.
Illustration can either be too simplistic or too figurative to represent the vast and complex needs of people who walk through the door. This is a design challenge that sits at the intersection of visual identity, feminist theory, and the ethics of representation. What visual language can speak across every identity, every background, every experience of arriving at a place like this? Because the people who need help from a family violence refuge do not share a single story, beyond the trauma being experienced in that moment. They bring different sets of challenges: immigration status, disability, language, poverty, race, age, health issues, community separation, the specific needs of children.
For us, the solution favoured symbolism, abstraction and a bold simplicity that would communicate warmth, safety, hope and courage. We built a system of shapes around a primary colour palette. Forms that represent the building blocks of a new life: stability, shelter, connection, support, identity.
The four shapes in the logo represent Courage Collective’s core services: safe accommodation (the green house), therapeutic programs (the purple flower), practical support (the blue steps) and dedicated support for children and young people (the yellow stacks). These are then surrounded by a complete system of shapes from which there is a set of intersecting blocks for each individual who arrives.
A visual vocabulary that is at once universal and personal, able to talk to the kind of care that places the person at its centre and goes from there.
It’s a design language that can travel from a website that lets the sector and supporters know what Courage Collective do, to a keyring for a door that offers a shattered family a new start.
It can hold the story of the people and the work without compromising anyone’s safety.
When it comes to the organisations doing the most important work, low profile is not the same as low impact.
Sometimes it’s the quietest who have the courage to make the most profound difference.
We are grateful for this opportunity to gently walk alongside them.
Find out more about Courage Collective and make a donation at couragecollective.org.au
