Girls Who Code

Girls Who Code is reinventing the future of technology by building the world’s largest pipeline of women engineers.

Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, Organizational Website, Data Visualization

Background

Girls Who Code has grown up. Founded in 2012 to teach 20 girls in NYC how to code, the organization has grown into a global movement teaching 185,000 girls around the world and reaching millions through resources, content, and branding. With the 10th anniversary approaching, the organization’s vision was twofold: mobilize the existing middle- and high-school population to learn code so that GWC could meet its ambitious 2027 goal to achieve gender parity.

Girls Who Code

The challenge

Today’s zeitgeist was pointing to a Generation Z that is highly engaged in social and political issues and wants to use their voices and platforms to make a difference. Coding is a powerful language for creating the world we wish to see. Our challenge was to unify the organization branding and build a focused, noise-free digital experience, all the while telling the story of young women changing the world with technology.

Dialing in an established brand

The quirky and easily recognizable GWC carried notable brand equity, but lacked versatility at scale. We redrew the logo to make it more visually balanced and web-friendly, and introduced a superhero “G” icon. The G is optimized for social media accounts, building even more momentum on platforms where GWC has substantial followings.

The Girls Who Code brand is now unified in its visual language—a dynamic and user-friendly design system comprised of accessible typography, flexible design elements, and color combinations chosen in careful adherence to visual web standards—and equipped with tools to modulate its voice for different audiences — Corporate partners & Investors, Parents & Girls, Girls — while maintaining a thread of visual resonance throughout. Its ecosystem of unique yet complementary platforms is now brought together through a bigger brand story, connecting users to the GWC mission no matter their entry point.

Girls make waves

We anchored the visual system in a narrative that speaks to the core goals and values of Girls Who Code: waves of momentum, waves of progress, waves of change. A visual interpretation of the shape of code lines written in a scripting window, it is also a metaphor for the power, strength, and resilience of a new generation of young women and girls coming together to effect positive change in the world.

“I really like the starting point of this and how it was interpreted in not just one single graphic treatment but six different ones, giving the identity a lot of flexibility all while building on a single, core idea.”

Armin Vit

Brand New

A quirky website for curious minds

We prioritized the perspectives of GWC’s unique audiences, from corporate stakeholders to young women, in developing a user experience that is exciting, welcoming, and infinitely more navigable. The new action-oriented website is brimming with energizing UI animations and photography that shows girls learning and exploring, with wave motifs creating surprising shapes and gradients throughout. With clearly defined user journeys and conversion-focused narrative structures, the Girls Who Code site now has the muscle to support—and grow— its huge global community.

Girls Who Code