_posts/2016-05-12-introducing-18fs-new-visual-identity.md
---
title: Introducing 18F’s new visual identity
date: 2016-05-12
authors:
- kate
- jthibault
tags:
- how we work
- culture
excerpt: "If you’re a frequent visitor to our website, you may have noticed a few updates — most notably, that we’ve got a new logo. For the past few months, members of our visual design team have been crafting and refining our new visual identity, and we’re thrilled to introduce it."
image: /assets/blog/visual-identity/logo.jpg
---
18F is known for many things: Our commitment to working in the open, our
use of agile methodologies, and our dedication to helping folks build
more useful, beautiful government services. We’ve also been known to
build the plane as we fly it, so to speak — to iterate on something
immediately upon completing one version of it.
Such was the case with our original visual identity. When we as an
organization were just getting started, our team created enough assets
to get things up and running. Until recently, 18F’s visual identity
included only a logo, a few primary colors (\#1188FF, white, and some
highlights for alerts), a display font (Raleway), and some loose
patterns of basic design elements, though these were malleable (we had
no central style guide).
Though we did have a visual style, we’d always had a plan to keep
refining it as our organization grew. Recently, members
of our visual design team have been crafting and refining our new visual
identity, and we’re thrilled to introduce it.
In our early days, we let our work do the talking for us rather than
dedicating resources to the development of a comprehensive visual
identity. Our Outreach team has done (and continues to do) an amazing
job of sharing our stories with the world, and dozens of 18F team
members have presented on their individual projects, helping spread
18F’s message.
During the summer of 2015, we finally had some hours to dedicate to
refining our visual identity. Last August, a small group of designers
gathered to start the rebranding process, and our new look as you see it
today took shape at that two-day summer work session. (We’ll be
publishing a separate post about this session in the near future,
so stay tuned.)
As is the case with all of 18F’s projects, the branding team began their
work by considering user need. Our brandathon, as it came to be known,
began with an organization-wide workshop on our core values; we used the
results of this workshop to guide all our subsequent work. After this
workshop, several design studios, and hours of work, the branding team
had an initial set of deliverables to share with the rest of 18F. It
included:
- A fully extended color palette (built for 508 compatibility)
- A single font family (a slightly customized version of [Nimbus Sans L](http://www.fontain.org/nimbus-sans-l/) — a close, open-source cousin to Helvetica)
- An evolved logo that has higher color contrast and is more legible at smaller sizes (in other words, more accessible)
- Presentation templates for Keynote and Google Slides (PowerPoint is in the works)
- An internal website where folks can get the most up-to-date assets
- A dedicated Slack channel where people can get help using these new materials
Eric Ronne, who participated in the summer work session, summed up the
team’s approach best: “At 18F we’re always changing and improving
government interactions for our users. We iterate constantly here, and
now we’ve iterated on our logo, too. Our goal was to refresh the mark
while nodding to the past, to create a straightforward update that’s
accessible, bold, modern, and flexible.”
Speaking to the technical considerations that impacted the logo refresh,
Eric continued, “We retained the square shape in our refresh as a nod to
the logo of our parent agency, GSA. We also created a style with a
simple, unembellished '18F,' free of any graphical icon. The text (drawn
by our designer, Ryan) is the hero here. Centered in the square, it adds
up to a clean, legible, and very flexible mark.”
In addition to updating the 18F logo, the branding team also created a
collection of images featuring the new logo and inspirational messaging,
the optimism of which is central to our brand. These images, which team
members use as desktop art, weren’t exactly the highest priority “need”
item, but they were a fast way to show the team how the new system could
begin to flex in more exciting ways than just templates.
*[Sky photo](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jet-sky.jpg)*
Though we’ve made great progress, our work is far from over. For now,
we’re focusing on updating our logo on our site and our social sites
around the web. Once we’ve accomplished that, we plan to create
infographic templates for our social media accounts. And eventually,
we’ll restructure and restyle our website, another outfit that we’ve
outgrown since we started in March 2014.
Because our branding team is small and our priority is always our work
with our agency partners, we expect that we’ll complete these remaining
tasks incrementally during the next several months — stay tuned for
updates. You can also expect future blog posts or public talks about
agile branding from our team. Historically, the worlds of agile and
developing brand identities have been hard to meld because it’s
difficult to keep track of big-picture perceptions when you’re working
in incremental features. We expect to learn a lot of about the process
of agile branding as we go, and we’ll share our learnings with you all.