Empowering a Climate Justice Movement

Everything about the wordmark from bright colors, to font, waveform, and exclamation point are intended to suggest a classic California good vibrations aesthetic.

Strategically, the brand stands out in the climate activist space, creates a sense of urgency and motivation, and implies the forward motion of a movement while avoiding the gloom and doom common in climate advocacy.

We produced a video that uses brand elements to tell the story of the Let’s Green California movement. It’s a core communication element that makes it easy for people to understand the basics of the movement in less than a minute.

The script, music, fonts, voiceover, and branded animation style bring the optimistic tenor of the movement to life.

Rather than traditional illustrations the Education Center uses Animated graphics to convey a lot of information in a compact space.

In lieu of traditional icons, we combined black & white photo cutouts with shapes and brand colors to add a playful, bright notes and an optimistic tone to images that represent, and are inclusive of, their diverse group of coalition partners and constituencies.

The optimistic vibe of the brand carries through the design system. The multiple versions of the sun icon, the brightly colored CTA buttons, and the “hope bubbles” seen throughout the Education Center give the Let’s Green California a family of elements to work with for future campaigns and communications.

We created a sub-brand visual language used to reference their constituencies. To give personality to the constituencies, each one is represented by an image, name, and primary and secondary color from the core brand palette.

The Education Center is a simple yet immersive experience that presents the case for a California Green New Deal in chapters. Each one starts with a question to entice people to seek the answer. They end with a positive action that a reader can take, and a preview of the next question.

The goal is to move people through the information quickly, call out the dangers posed by the climate crisis, and use tactics of encouragement like starting invitations in the “hope bubbles’ with ‘Let’s’ to be inclusive and build a sense of the greater movement.

We built the digital hub using page transitions, thoughtful animations, and interactive elements such as the plan timeline, emissions graph, and constituency photo grid to make for a delightful and engaging learning experience.

The Action Center is the heart of the Let’s Green California movement. The minimalist design provides immediate ways for supporters to get involved, from taking actions to donating or learning about recent successes and setbacks.

For the LGCA team, it’s where the movement lives and breathes day to day. It’s a place for them to fundraise, increase awareness, grow their advocacy base, and deepen the engagement of supporters.

People come to the LGCA digital hub with varying depths of understanding. Some have enough information to dive right in and take action. Others want to more fully investigate the details behind the plan to pass a California Green New Deal.

The Action Center and Education Center work in harmony to fill both needs. The full story can be explored in the Education Center where visitors find ample jumping-off points to take action. The Action Center gets people involved while giving them opportunities to learn more via the Education Center.

Our strategy with the complementary Action and Education Centers, is to drive people to become part of the movement. The story-driven Education Center is sprinkled with “action cards” and “hope bubbles” that encourage people to get involved.

When people arrive at the Action Center, they are focused on participating in the movement. By minimizing distractions and friction, people can quickly complete an action, get a feeling of accomplishment, and be primed to increase their involvement.

Our strategy for the name of the movement was to lead with action and inclusivity. It would have been simple to stick with California Green New Deal, but the Let’s Green California name is an invitation for people to join the movement.

To carry this through the campaigns, we crafted assets for the LGCA team to use for email outreach and social media communications. For activists and influencers, we designed printable posters and banners for use in the Activist Toolkit in the Action Center.

The Action Center houses an Activist Toolkit that contains assets plus a style guide to keep the Let’s Green California brand consistent when used by supporters outside of the organization.

The messaging in the Education Center is intentionally straight forward about the problem, but also optimistic about the solution on offer. Short, simple, and direct copy gets ideas across without the need for wonky, slow, exhaustive reading.

For people who want to get into the weeds, the final chapter of the narrative goes more into depth and offers readers options to expand their knowledge of the challenges and solutions involved in creating a just and green economy. Policy wonks can even read the full 50-page plan.

Our 50 page brand style guide covers wordmark, color, and typography along with photography and illustration styles to help the LGCA team keep brand consistency as the campaign rolls out. Included in the style guide is consolidated messaging and a communication guide that includes grammar rules and movement-specific terminology usage.