Good Shepherd Center empowers children and adults in the Chicago area to lead exceptional lives. As a community advocate, Good Shepherd Center provides support, services, and education to children and adults with or without disabilities.
As the organization grew in size, Good Shepherd Center recognized that they needed a modern brand redesign, a user-friendly website, and effective communication with their community.
Working alongside Good Shepherd Center, The Loop Marketing modernized their branding, re-developed their website, and delivered an impactful social media marketing strategy.
Brand Redesign
The Challenge
Since The Good Shepherd Center’s founding as a school for children with disabilities and their families in 1963, the agency grew into a multi-service agency now serving children and adults with and without disabilities as well as their families.
The Good Shepherd Center needed an overhauled brand redesign, including new logos and brand guidelines to match the agency’s growth. Their previous branding relied on a muted color palette, variable fonts and didn’t align with the agency’s modern goals.
Branding allows agencies to develop relationships with current and potential clients. For The Good Shepherd Center, this included reaching out to donors/funders from corporations and foundations, as well as individuals, potential board members, and grants. Their branding at the time did not reflect the community they were building.
The Solution
Redesigning a brand requires complete buy-in from all stakeholders. We began our branding work by conducting comprehensive interviews to understand the agency, their audience, and their goals. From there, our team identified areas of branding to build stronger relationships between The Good Shepherd Center and the community they serve.
We focused on three major areas:
- Logo
- Color Palette and Fonts
- Graphics
The result was a wholly reimagined branding for The Good Shepherd center that married their historical past with the agency’s modern community outreach.
We worked to create a new logo featuring a blue bird sitting on an extended tree branch. Our team wanted to highlight that the Good Shepherd Center is the foundation (tree) from which you can grow (leaves) and then fly (bird) your own path.
As for the color palette, we wanted to brighten everything to inspire excitement and joy every time someone looked at The Good Shepherd Center. We kept the traditional “Good Shepherd Center Royal Blue” and grew the color palette from there. Yellow and orange were added to complement the blue and while mixing in a yellow and orange to give a sense of empowerment and symbolize warmth, brightness and energy. The green color evokes new life and growth, energy, and youthfulness, and is bright but not harsh on the eyes. These colors are also all in their primary and saturated state as the primary colors are associated with youth and education.
When it came to font choice, many factors were considered. From readability, to accessibility, to the overall design of the font, no aspect was ignored. It was important to us that the fonts chosen would be free to use for our client as well as have no issue showing up on different screens across the web.
For the heading font, we chose Sansita Regular as the font is strong but not rigid with soft edges to give a sense of a strong, supportive, caring foundation. To complement the strong header font and provide balance, we chose Quicksand for the body text font. Quicksand is reminiscent of a children’s handwriting book, representing childhood education and the skills gained by those Good Shepherd Center serves.
Lastly, our team designed a variety of graphics in accordance with the brand guidelines for use on social media, and the new website. The idea was simple: make everything uniform while presenting programs and events in an inviting (and easily shareable) format.
Utilizing this template assisted in redesigning the website as the graphics on Instagram oftentimes matched the color scheme and layout of the website. We wanted current and future clients to feel like social media was an extension of their site versus a different entity.
The Loop Marketing’s team guided us through the [rebranding and website redesign] project with great professionalism. Observing their process was amazing and gratifying.
Since our work with them our business has never been more successful. All their information was spot-on and aided our smaller non-profit grow into a larger space. We cannot thank them enough for all they have done for us and count ourselves blessed to have such great new friends of the agency.
– Brendan McCormick | Executive Director, Good Shepherd Center
Website Redesign
The Challenge
The Good Shepherd Center’s website did not reflect the welcoming, empowering community they had built. The original website hadn’t been built with company growth in mind, nor did it align with ADA standards. This meant the perfect time for a complete website redesign to match their updated branding guidelines.
The agency wanted to improve the feel of the website to be more user-friendly on desktop and mobile while making it more accessible to all visitors. The Good Shepherd Center’s updated branding was inviting, community-focused, and empowering, and we wanted their new website to reflect those same ideals.
The Solution
When developing any website, we aim to create something that stands the test of time while remaining fast, user-friendly, and attractive to any audience. For The Good Shepherd Center, we already had a new color palette, logo, and typography, so the next step was to build a new website that matched their brand guidelines.
We wanted everyone who visited The Good Shepherd Center’s website to feel comfortable and welcome. When we began work on the homepage, we updated the menu bar to the classic royal blue while adding a prominent “Donate” button call-to-action alongside it.
The Good Shepherd homepage now also featured a new background image of a young girl working alongside a text box featuring their new tagline: “Empowering Individuals to Lead Exceptional Lives.”
These additions to the homepage invited new clients to the agency without pushing away anyone from the past. We also redesigned all program pages to be more attractive and included contact information so users can get all the information they need on one page.
There were a few more updates before the new website launched: we installed Google Analytics to update tracking information, made the website ADA compliant, and utilized SEO best practices when creating a new program page.