Measuring gender and diversity accurately

How to Measure Gender & Diversity

Shine a light

Branding, print, web

Catalyst is a global nonprofit which works with some of the world’s most powerful CEOs and leading companies to help build workplaces that work for women. I was approached to design a brand for the Gender and Diversity KPI Alliance, a group formed to promote a smart and effective measurement standard for assessing gender and other types of diversity in organizations.

And, of course, this brand had to come into existence within two weeks.

A high speed project

I set to work creating a mark for the organization. As the title is a string of seven words, I looked towards the two key words, gender and diversity, for a solution. Interlocking them provided a nice metaphor about interconnectedness, working together, and equality, and created a satisfying mark.

Because the mark would be used by large corporations like Pfizer and Price Waterhouse Cooper, it needed to fit into the corporate visual universe, while maintaining its independence as something 'other.' I used the color scheme to help push the brand towards a corporate look—close to the traditional dark blue—but not all the way.

Developing the brand further, I used color and shape as a metaphor for GDKA's key performance indicators: they shine a light into companies—illuminating and clarifying where they stand with regard to being inclusive and diverse workspaces. This allowed us to clarify the mission of the GDKA to potential clients as not just measuring categories like race and gender, but also age and culture, and much more.