A brand catching up with itself
When I started working with FilmAid they had long outgrown their grassroots beginnings. In Kenyan and Thai refugee camps they had been brought under the umbrella of the UN. Within the film industry they had forged deep partnerships in Hollywood, Hong Kong and the UK. Their public face needed to catch up with their current status.
Swagger & Sincerity
“We’re known in the refugee camps as the organization with swagger!” executive director Liz Manne told me with a proud smile. From then on every design, branding and communications decision we made was rooted in the personalities of the people working on the ground in refugee camps from Kenya to Thailand.
Evolution not revolution
Since the 1990s in refugee camps around the world FilmAid’s logo has been carefully silkscreened on t-shirts, hand-painted on cinderblock walls and adhered to the sides of off-road vehicles. The logo needed an update but we needed to be sensitive to its roots. We love to smash old stuff to make way for the new, but that’s not always the right solution!
Animation, refugees, goats & warm beer
I traveled to a remote refugee camp in northern Kenya in 2012 to run two weeks of design and animation workshops with FilmAid’s filmmaking students. To say I learned more from them than vice versa may sound trite, but there it is. The experience deepened my understanding of FilmAid’s work and re-enforced my belief that small, personal connections can make a big impact.
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