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San Francisco Business Times
GANG CONCERNS COLOR S.F. ORGANIZATION'S REBRANDING
by Jim Gardner
July 28, 2003 (San Francisco, CA)
Redesigning a corporate logo and the other "rebranding"
mumbo-jumbo usually has to satisfy a variety of parties, such as staff,
shareholders and customers.
Rarely does it have to pass muster with street gangs, but after more
than 30 years working among San Francisco's disadvantaged youth, Mission
District nonprofit Horizons knows its turf -- literally.
So when it called in San Francisco design firm Manmade to do a top-to-bottom
rebranding to assist it in fund-raising, it had to caution the designers:
No reds or blues in the new logo or anything else -- those are colors
respectively associated with the Norteños and Sureños,
the dominant gangs in Horizon's neighborhood.
As the firm delved deeper into the project, it discovered other colors
were off limits for similar reasons, said Jon Williams, Manmade's
creative director.
"Yellow and green were out -- they've been used by gangs in the
recent past," he said.
As for pastels like baby blue and pink, well, they are becoming nearly
as explosive as blue and red.
"We were moving in the direction of brown," he said. "In
researching that, there was the possibility that through printing
anomalies, it could be perceived as too close to red."
In the end, that left black as pretty much the only choice: it includes
all colors and it's hard to mess up in the printing process. Horizon's
new logo is all black, a representation of the ancient Mayan symbol
for community, and its staff have now been kitted out in matching
black jackets.
Getting a crash course in San Francisco gang culture was an eye-opener
for the British-born Williams, a designer in the city for seven years.
He's now thinking about producing maps of the various gang territories
so everyone knows what's what.
Such as the discovery that his staff's favorite eatery, a Mission
District taqueria (which Williams did not want to name for safety
reasons), is on the boundary of two gang territories. Not that he's
worried: "As designers, we usually wear black."
© 2003 American City Business Journals Inc.
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