Art Direction, Design and Project Management for Young Leaders Network

In June 2018 I was hired by London-based youth engagement agency We Are Futures to conceptualize and built a network of young creatives as a new insight generator & commercial arm. At the time it was merely a set of slides and a few proposal documents to the board of directors. After initial research and strategy development, I introduced Young Leaders Network (YLN - named by me). The general premise behind the name and direction was to demonstrate “leadership as a collective process that can catalyze the power of networks to create social change” - we believed that leadership was not a trait found merely in a few, but rather a superpower that could be tapped into via the collective effort of many. After having the name approved, I then worked on the art direction and logo inception for YLN. YLN's logo draws for a few key things: 1. 'grape green' to represent informal communication via the "grapevine" - how most young people choose to communicate with each other, 2. three boxes that together formed a rectangle with the same 9:16 ratio's of a modern smartphone screen, alluding to our main form of contact and connection with our network, and 3. three boxes which were meant to allude to a visual, vertical-video podcast for IGTV that we would (/could) eventually produce, called "The Grapevine Podcast". (See below for early font and design samples) Logos were approved, and for the remainder of my time as Youth Engagement Executive at We Are Futures I managed all recruitment, direction and social media management for YLN. I created a lead series on the Instagram page which was called the #YLNshowcase, where we interviewed creative members of the network and showcased their work. Each of the alternate logos below are an example of the logo fills we created for each week of the showcase. YLN is currently the third commercial pillar for We Are Futures with members currently participating in paid briefs alongside the agency, while a unique online audience of 1000+ has been created and catered to.