A Spirited Evolution

North Star Fund was founded in 1979. The fund has distributed 29 million dollars to 1,600 grassroots groups working to create a more equitable and democratic city for all New Yorkers. North Star Fund lived through three successful decades and collected a vast network of funders and groups who they helped support. With Hyperakt's help, North Star Fund recently updated their brand identity and collateral material and developed their web presence to better represent all of their stakeholders. The updated look has helped cast an even wider net around an ever-expanding network.

Building on a Legacy

Our relationship with North Star Fund began through Mark Leger, their Communications Manager. We worked with Mark on a project at the One Club. When Mark moved to North Star Fund, the organization had been together for 27 years, yet their corporate identity, marketing materials, and web presence were lagging behind. The original logo, designed by a board member years ago, was a powerful image but being used inconsistently. Their marketing material was not cohesive and their website didn't reflect the depth of the organization's mission or its vast scope of stakeholders. Mark approached us to consolidate the brand one step at a time, to start bringing the pieces together into a cohesive identity.

Unifying the Brand

The brand identity was our first project. The original icon had a lot of equity with the funders donors, trustees, and staff. Any departure from the icon needed to be done gradually. We approached it by keeping the original illustrative mark. We chose a cleaner and bolder font, Trade Gothic, for the corporate identity, allowing us to expand the visual vocabulary of the brand without clashing in new contexts.

After resolving the logo, we moved into developing a new stationary system. We incorporated the logo and brought the organization's mission to the forefront, literally. The mission is now printed in bold type on the back of every business card.

Our next task was to develop the 2006 annual report, called Tools for Democracy. It was the first conceptual piece we did for the North Star Fund, and it set the tone for the two annual reports that have followed. Although each year's report has a different concept, they are all themed and are treated as a set. The consistency of the format, the paper quality, the use of black and white photography, and illustration with icons or typography cohesively communicates North Star Fund's areas of impact from year to year.

The North Star Fund's identity brochure outlines the mission and the top level organizational messages. It concentrates on the donor and grantee relationship, the donor's involvement, and the benefited grantee's results. This piece has a pocket that holds additional material to help introduce the organization to its future donors.

We've moved into branding North Star Fund's events, which includes everything from creating the event identity to the invitation, collateral, email blasts, postcards, and more. We produced the work for their largest fundraising events, their Spring Gala and the News Prize.

The biggest body of work we've done for North Star Fund has been in redesigning the look and feel of their website. We worked closely with staff to determine the organization's needs and partnered with a development team to program the site. We helped to develop the site architecture, wireframes, and the website strategy. The final design of the site reflects the corporate brand, which had been established through printed material Hyperakt designed. Our goal was to enable North Star Fund to use their website as a powerful and relevant communication tool.

Empowering Through Design

The level of investment coming from both sides has made our work and relationship with North Star Fund very strong. We admire their mission for equality, social justice, and peace. Their active support of community groups inspires us. They respect the creative process and recognize the need for challenging, conceptual design work. North Star Fund pushes us to produce work that is as bold and direct as it is poetic and inspiring.