WDD: Meet Ariel The

By Elizabeth Cui

Ariel The, current Scout Alumni Relations Director!

Hi everyone!

I’m Ariel, a 5th-year Graphic and Information Design major and the Alumni Relations Manager for Scout this fall. I’ve done two co-ops, my first at Polonsky and Friends and second at the Harvard Business Review. I’ve also been in Scout for 4 semesters!

I’m interning as a freelancer at a marketing agency right now, and it’s inspired me to take a look at other agencies that have been on my radar. For this WDD, I wanted to share a super cool agency that I’ve been keeping an eye on!

COLLINS’s logo

COLLINS is a brand experience design company based in New York and San Francisco. I really love the work that they’ve recently done, including their Girl Scouts of America campaign and Figma rebrand.

Girl Scouts of America

“We started with a question: what does “preparing girls to meet the world with courage, confidence and character” mean today?”

The Girl Scouts of America approached COLLINS to help redesign their branding. 3 things COLLINS looked to accomplish were:

1. Reaffirming Girl Scout’s relevance in the lives of young women.
2. Reasserting the Girl Scout identity as a clear emblem of their mission.
3. Reorienting the movement’s legacy to fuel the future.

I was instantly drawn to the color palette that they went with. It’s got these bright, fun, almost childlike rainbow colors. I resonate a lot with the way that they’ve incorporated color to modernize and bring youth and vitality to the brand. In the past, the Girl Scouts of America have been pretty monotone and uniform, primarily relying on earth tones. With COLLINS, they’re channeling a sense of childhood nostalgia through brightness while still keeping it academic with the reserved font.

A closer look at the revamped Girl Scout badges

Figma

“We realized that Figma’s brand truth was also a universal one — Nothing Great Is Made Alone. As a brand and campaign line, it gave us a rallying cry and a way to prove that what makes something a work of genius is never the work of one lone genius.”

Across the board, Collins creates consistently fun and bright work. They use interesting type as well as shape: they use shape as a visual vocabulary for all of their designs and brand identities. With Figma, it is really no different. Their rebrand is very colorful and unique, but also more cartoon-esque, capturing the sense of community building that Figma allows users to have.

There’s a strong emphasis on Figma’s collaborative aspect, and you can really see that through the animations. Also slay!

Trendsetters

If you look back at COLLINS’s older work, they really are the trendsetters that set standards for what people are designing now. The projects they did a couple years ago have aged well and still hold up. Despite the ever-changing and fast paced industry, much of their design work remains timeless, which is really impressive!

What’s also super impressive is how they accurately predicted these design trends years ahead. It’s a testament to how thoughtful their designers are and how much effort they put into pushing boundaries.

To see more of COLLINS’s projects, which include collaborations with brands like Spotify and Nike, check out their website here.

💫 That’s all for now! Thanks for reading!💫