Brand Identity · Huebert Impact Research

A magnifying glass inside a meteor.

Client

Huebert Impact Research

Role

Naming, Brand Identity & Documentation

Document

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Huebert Impact Research combination mark in white on brand blue — a magnifying glass trailing like a meteor, beside the wordmark
01

The Brief

The founder was at the very beginning of her practice, with no existing look, no direction, and nothing documented. We ran the whole process in order, starting with the name and working through the mark, the colors, and the type.

The brand had to do two things at once. Impact research means evaluation work for nonprofits, so it needed to feel approachable, but it also needed to convey rigor, since the product is credible evidence.

02

The Process

The project started with pages of hand-drawn thumbnails that never go to the client: letter combinations, puzzle pieces, bell curves, and a lot of ideas that only needed to exist long enough to rule them out.

Hand-drawn logo thumbnails — HIR letterforms, puzzle pieces, bell curves, and cube studies
Hand-drawn logo thumbnails — HIR letterform studies in outline and solid

The founder's first direction was a puzzle piece, and two of the four options in round one followed it. The other two went after the part of the work I was most curious about, the technical side of research. Option 2 is a bar topped with an error bar, and option 3 is a pair of overlapping bell curves. Both are ways of picturing statistical significance.

The idea was to take the most jargon-heavy piece of the field and make it sleek. Someone who does research would read it instantly. Anyone else would just see a good-looking mark.

Round one — four logo options: an HIR monogram, a bar with an error bar, overlapping bell curves, and an H cut like a puzzle piece
Round one. Options 2 and 3 turn statistical significance into a mark.

She narrowed it to two, the puzzle-piece monogram and the bell curves, and I took both into color.

The two round one finalists — puzzle-piece HIR monogram and bell-curve mark — in brand blue and in four accent colors

Neither one stuck. That happens, and going back is part of the process. What kept coming up in our conversations was the magnifying glass, so the next round focused on it: nine marks, each pairing the magnifying glass with a second idea, including a pie chart, a question mark, an eye, and a detective's hat that doubles as a bell curve.

Nine logo options built around a magnifying glass, shown in white on brand blue with short descriptions
The magnifying glass round. Option 3 became the mark.
03

The Identity

Option 3 won. It cuts the practice down to its two ideas, impact and research, and puts both in one form: a magnifying glass with its handle trailing behind it like a meteor. The mark ships as a combination mark, a wordmark, and a standalone symbol, in blue and teal.

Huebert Impact Research combination mark in brand blue
HIR symbol in blue — the meteor magnifying glass
HIR symbol in teal

Typography handles a lot of the balance. Headings use Termina, a geometric sans, and a modified cut of it makes up the logo. Paragraph text is EB Garamond. Blue and teal lead the palette with yellow as an accent.

Color page — blue and teal primaries with yellow accent and softened black and white
Typography page — Termina for headings, Work Sans as an alternative, EB Garamond for paragraphs
Termina for headings, EB Garamond for body.

The identity went straight into the firm's website, which I built right afterward, and into its reports.

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