AAJA Rebrand and Web - In-House International | Creative + Design + Development

Over the past decade, sweeping changes in how media is made, consumed, and valued have forced journalism as a whole to quickly adapt. What this has to do with the AAJA rebrand, you ask?

Well, in this case, it’s about supporting a mission. In late 2016, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) sought to answer one question: “how can AAJA best serve the global community it represents?”

In pursuit of this answer, AAJA approached In-House International with three broad goals:

To update their visual identity with a new logo and system that reflect AAJA’s values and character
To redesign their website, improving experience and design for AAJA members
To engage with a new generation of members with an updated website and digital footprint.

AAJA is a membership non-profit that serves journalists at every stage of their career in the U.S. and abroad. Most of their programs and chapters are run by members who volunteer, playing a huge role in the organization. In other words: there’s a large number of stakeholders, many of whom are greatly invested in the organization.

Process

The timeline moved fast: we had less than three months from discussion to delivery. First, we needed to understand the brand values–what should the AAJA brand say? How do those things translate visually? Together, we learned that AAJA is about community, an organization that is forward-thinking, impactful and influential. We built out from there: how the brand should feel, what it should do for members etc.

The logo’s use of red and signature-like movement are a nod to the original identity. The clean shapes give the logo versatility and longevity. The logo shows an organization that is welcoming, modern, impactful, but also one that has a history. We selected a secondary palette of modern yellow and maroon and two flexible, smart fonts to round out the visual identity.

Using the new brand, we moved into the website. Priorities had been set, so we wireframed, polished, designed the interface. To implement, we built the site for Nationbuilder.Nationbuilder is a proprietary CMS often used by non-profits, and while somewhat rigid, it’s known for its excellent membership management.This selection was an important part of their journey as an evolving, member-centered organization.

Over the course of a few weeks, we took what was a highly streamlined CMS and developed custom content management tools that accommodated for AAJA’s ever-changing content and allowed for editable design.

Results

In under three months, In-House refreshed AAJA’s brand, delivered a new logo, identity, and custom, functionally optimized new Nationbuilder-based website.

The new logo’s angularity, gliding strokes and two-tone palette maintains the traditional strong suits of the organization, while simultaneously attracting a new generation of journalists. The same can be said for the organization’s redesigned brand and website.

We took a CMS and developed flexible, custom content management tools that allow for editable design and accommodate AAJA’s living community (embodied in its ever-evolving programs, community initiatives and member stories). Now, AAJA’s members can easily join or renew, discover more about the organization’s values and initiatives, all while finding current information about the organization’s many local chapters and programs.

AAJA wrote about this rebranding process and its results on their blog.