2023

Brooklyn Org

Senior Designer, Mother Design

How might we transform a community foundation into an iconic cultural institution?

Brooklyn Community Foundation had quietly reshaped the borough, but its identity hadn't caught up. The rebrand set out to make the foundation feel as iconic and inclusive as Brooklyn itself.

Mother Design Team: Mark Sloan, Danielle Horanieh, Kozue Yamada, Gonzalo Donoso, Betsy Dickerson

The Brooklyn Bridge motif, used extensively across the borough's landscape, had become too pervasive to be ownable.

The Brief

After 15 years as Brooklyn Community Foundation, the organization had outgrown its brand. Traditional philanthropy carries a perception problem — often feeling elitist, insular, and detached. The brief called for a complete rebrand: new name, new visual identity, new voice, built to reposition the foundation as a fixture of the borough rather than a distant institution.

The Solution

Every design decision was grounded in the borough's cultural and physical fabric. The result scales from subway ads to annual reports to motion without losing its specificity. The guidelines were designed to be executed by a small team — clear enough to maintain consistency without requiring a dedicated design resource.

View the full case study.

Following launch, Brooklyn Org nearly tripled board-driven support, doubled gross receipts, and tripled donations year-over-year.

The Wordmark

The wordmark draws from the borough's residential architecture. The angular geometry of a city block's courtyard is embedded in the three O's, threading through the remaining letterforms. The mark can also separate to frame imagery, functioning as both logo and compositional device.

The secondary BKO shorthand is designed for smaller spaces — a sign-off or mark of quality for applications like app icons and merch.

Color Palette

The palette draws from the Brooklyn flag and the borough's iconic landmarks, sites, and textures — a mix of deeper, more subtle hues and brighter pastels designed for unexpected pairings. The colors are deployed through a layered framing device inspired by historical Brooklyn postcards.

Typography

Community Gothic, by Brooklyn foundry Frere-Jones, is a serendipitously named fit. Its range of styles gives the identity the versatility to shift between utilitarian and expressive tones.

“The Foundation of Our Future”

The SYSTEM

The identity is built to scale. The wordmark's framing capability, the layered postcard device, and the bold color palette combine into a system that works equally across subway ads, annual reports, merchandise, and motion.

Identity for Brooklyn Org’s annual Changemakers Ball.