How Colors Can Start Conversations
What is it with humans and colors? We all love them. As children, we pick our favorite color(s). As adults, we develop identities around the colors we wear and use in home design. As of course, in organizations, colors are a big part of a brand’s identity.
When we created genEquality’s original branding in 2017, we gravitated towards colors that didn't have stereotypical gender associations: purple, green, gray, black and white. Over the years, we've struggled to find specific shades and colors that we felt connected to in any way - and we wanted to change that. In this process, we came up with something even more meaningful than a set of primary brand colors.
The 'aha' moment in our rebranding color brainstorm process came from our Creative Director, Lisa Maione. In one of our (many) meetings, she proposed the idea of customizing genEquality's gray shade by using the values of the wage gap. Women make 80 cents on the dollar, so Wage Gap Gray would be CMYK 20-20-20-20. Our Executive Director, Sherry Hakimi, loved that idea - and asked if we could make every one of our colors using gender data. In the following weeks, using all the research and data that we've amassed around the genEquality activations, we created five color palettes informed by gender data.
We originally began working on these color palettes for our brand identity and programmatic use, but very quickly realized that this was something that we could and should share with the world in service of our mission. These colors can be used anywhere - from Instagram posts, to Nudge Art murals, to organizational print materials, to walls inside your home. It's a unique way to embed purpose into what we see in the world.
So, how does color offer an opportunity for meaning in genEquality’s brand? We built each color in CMYK (see Footnote 1) for our brand system with gender-related data in mind. For example, Literacy Blue is 89.9% cyan, 83.1% magenta, 0 yellow and 9% black. In this spirit, every color in the brand system connects related issues directly related to gender equality and equity. We start here with our primary brand palette: Literacy Blue, Not-Funny Violet, Executive Gray, Share The Work Teal, Representation Red, Wage Gap Green. Dig in to see what conversations each of these colors spark for you and in your communities.
Now, every color we use can start a conversation. Each color is an opportunity to activate dialogue about equality, equity, and inclusion. Each color and palette is a way to hold space for questions, conversations, and dialogue around these important, intersectional, and multi-dimensional issues.
How about that for a creative activation? :)
Footnote: (fun fact: printed colors are often made from percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black colors to make the range of colors we see)