People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) make up 10% of our communities. Unfortunately, most people in this group feel isolated from others, both with and without IDD. And while most people with disabilities report they wish to work, over 80% of them are unemployed, even those with valuable skills to offer.
This is a problem, but it has a solution in which we can all play a part. By engaging and interacting more frequently with others who have IDD, those of us without IDD can help remove stigmas and can encounter and defeat our own prejudices and biases. So when a local coffee shop was opening with the mission of providing gainful employment to people with IDD and the agency I was employed at was tasked with naming and branding it, we set to work.
A novel business deserves a novel name. Copywriter Gary Bostwick came up with the invented word “Moji,” which sounds approachable and playful. Its similarity to “emoji” connects it to the little cartoony smiles that have suffused our culture. And like any word, it needs meaning. We define “Moji” as: The jolt of joy you get when you make others happy.
I was creating bespoke wordmark concepts when I noticed that wrapping the descender of the J around the bottom of the O produced an abstract form of a person waving, anchored at the center of the wordmark. Suddenly the logo itself could be a canvas for someone, even an employee with a non-verbal disability, to communicate a simple greeting or happy message. Suddenly every piece of branded ephemera has the potential to facilitate a very human moment and bring people together.
This concept I created was one I was very proud of, even if it wasn't ultimately selected. The challenge of Moji, in its simplest form, is to bridge the gap between people with IDD who want to be involved in everyday society and contribute, and people without IDD who may feel uncomfortable at first if they've never had the chance to get to know someone who has IDD. I really wanted to create something that, in some small way at least, could play a part in being that bridge. Can a brand really do that though? Act as a media through which a connection, perhaps even a friendship can begin? One of the reasons I do this job is because I firmly believe that the answer is yes.
IFB Solutions (formerly Winston-Salem Industries for the Blind) is an organization which hires workers with sight impairment, giving them meaningful employment in skilled manufacturing. From office supplies to mattresses to eyewear, IFB Solutions is an organization overflowing with good will and great stories of triumph.
And their Optical division even more so: Producing nearly 2,000 pairs of lenses every day for veteran clients within the VA hospital system and U.S. Navy NEXCOM centers, IFB Optical literally allows the blind to give others their sight back.
Wanting to evolve their brand and sell directly to conventional consumers as well (and knowing they'd be up against eyewear brand juggernauts like Warper Parker), IFB Optical tapped writer Gary Bostwick and me to name and create the identity for their new brand. We eventually found a(n ironic) name with context for both the sight-impaired community and the eyewear industry: if 20/20 represents perfect vision, then 20/200 ("twenty, two-hundred") is the threshold for legal blindness.
The client was thrilled with our solution, and following the brand rollout in summer of 2017, they saw a 110% increase in veteran glasses upgrades, a metric that confirms we accomplished our dual business objectives: 1.) communicate our brand mission (our research showed that 72% of veterans have a more favorable outlook on a brand like Twenty200 when they understand its mission), and 2.) make veterans aware of the upgrade options available through Twenty200 as part of their VA eyewear benefits (nearly 75% of veterans said they wanted upgrade options, but only 25% took advantage of eyewear upgrades according to 2015 data).
Regardless of a client’s size, their budget, or the project’s scope, I approach each project with the same attention and conviction. This logo was created simply for a trade with our pet sitter, and when I showed it to her she started crying. That’s the power of brand — the ability to elevate any business’s (even the smallest one) stature or authority in the eyes of its audience.
Fun fact: This is, by far, my most stolen logo. I perform a Google reverse image search about once a year or so and usually find someone using it without permission for their pet-sitting business.
Sometimes you design a logo for a business and you're not even aware of it. I created this W-S monogram (for Winston-Salem, the city where I live) as an exercise several years ago and uploaded it to Dribbble. A few years later I did a cursory Google image search for it and it returned a hookah bar in Moscow, Russia which was using my design as its logo.
I reached out and the owner of the business was horrified — he had paid a local designer in good faith for a brand and that person copied my work wholesale. He showed me screenshots confronting the "designer" in question who admitted the plagiarism. The owner apologized and offered to pay a token sum to redeem the theft. I appreciated the symbolic gesture, knowing that protecting IP in a faraway place like Russia is next to impossible and he could have just as easily ignored me from the start. So I granted Workshop of Smoke the free use of the logo in Russia in a reciprocal gesture.
While not an ideal situation to start with, it ended on a satisfactory note for both parties, and the owner and I still correspond occasionally.
