2x4 Foundation

2023

The founders of 2x4 Foundation, Nikki and Emily, created a foundation with a simple idea: help connect donors to meaningful organizations working to better the lives of women in America. We partnered with them to develop the foundation’s visual and verbal identity with a new name and logo, along with guidelines for assets and website development.

2x4foundation.org

The 2x4 Foundation encompasses an entire mission: to establish a foundation to, by and for women. And the resulting brand identity evokes the foundational strength of women helping women.

Built on the pillars of inclusivity, connection, and support, we set out to craft an identity that felt like a warm hug, welcoming both donors and nonprofits alike.

As a part of our verbal identity, we developed a series of core Brand Beliefs. As an exercise to ensure these beliefs held up in design, we asked ourselves: “How do our Brand Beliefs translate to core Guiding Principles for our visual system?”

An example of this was taking “All women deserve support.” and translating that into words like inclusive and expansive, which led us to creating an inviting color palette that embraced all identities and ideologies.

The logo is a visual representation of “creating connections” through joining letterforms in an elegant and unexpected way. These ligatures add a sense of fluidity and movement to a static logo, creating a “ripple effect” between letters.

Typography is at the forefront of this direction, as strong connections are forged by communication. Serif typography feels friendly and trustworthy, and lends itself to longer-form copy to convey information.

Messaging is key, so we wanted our layout system to reflect that — giving space and breathing room for bold messages to shine, while keeping secondary messaging compartmentalized and clean.

Our grid system plays into the name, 2x4. Grids can be flexible and adaptive to platforms, while information is contained within the four quadrants.