Building Beyond Policing

Branding Design

Building Beyond Policing (BBP) is focused on creating a society without police. BBP’s mission is centered around its national and regional network of abolitionist organizations. Their aim is forward progress in the creation and implementation of strategies concerning dismantling of policing institutions. I worked on this project with my friend Nelson Nance, where I played the main designer role. Nelson and I created several sketches of the logo, and we ultimately went forward on developing this concept of the brand’s letterforms, creating a chain that is being broken. When the logo was complete, I expanded the branding to a full system that was used to create the final website.

This was for the intitial start of BBP as a whole, and they wanted their logo to reflect their intent of the organization while also being a mark they could own, and grow with. In my initial concept I built my ideas from nouns in relation to reform, abstracted symbols of abolition, and icons inspired by construction and community to distill the voice of the brand mark. You can see in examples 1-28 many of these ideas I mentioned were explored, though we ended up moving forward with a concept Nelson sketched out, in concept #44. His idea of taking the negative space in the letterforms of the brand’s initials to create a chain with a broken link was honestly brilliant, so we refined his idea.

Here, you can see some of the process we took in developing the logo mark. On the left is Nelson’s sketch, just cleaned up slightly. On the right is my first pass at trying to add some depth, or a metallic look. Through this stage we understood that the letterforms need to be more obviously legible, considering they were to be slightly obscured or broken apart, in the case of the letter “P”.

I redrew the letters in their capital versions, and repositioned each so the entire logo would sell the effect of the chain, while also being readable. I laid the perspective of the “P” out mostly flat to the viewer to contrast the two “B’s” hanging together in a chain. Through rounds of iterations, this was also designed to give subconscious meaning to the community oriented ideas of the “Building Beyond” aspect, and the dismantling and separation of the “Policing” part.

From here I began the refinement process, and drew single and multi-colored versions of the logo. As well as working on the adaptable sizes, and simplifying the mark into more of an icon, for versatility. Considering the look of the logo, I wanted to use heavy shadow areas to empasize the letters themselves, while the actual rendering of these areas gives the material a metallic feeling, helping to communicate the idea of chains. I went with this warmer palette for the full color version instead of a colder steel appearance, to give some contrast to what I felt was becoming a mark with a lot of heavy context. The team also felt the warmth was more inviting.

We did not land on the final color palette initially. You can see in these examples below, the original cooler tones, weren’t matching the energy of BBP. We worked on creating a set of starburst shapes that could be used with the brand, to represent the “breaking” in the chain, without all of the letters being there. We tried some comic book inspired textures as well as an absolutely hideous blue, teal and yellow color scheme that did not work. We went back to the computer and redid the branding’s graphics package and brought it into a more cohesive space where the elements could speak together better, and everything was more accessible.

Towards the end we landed on a more inviting color palette, and a strong typeface system that felt exactly how we wanted it to. Strong, direct and approachable. A new texture pattern and supplemental graphics based on the style of the logo were created to fill out the brand and allow for greater applications, down the line.

This was a fun project! though it took several rounds of iterating, I believe we landed on a system that really represents the voice that Buildind Beyond Policing will need to keep soaring high with their abolitionist endeavors.