Brand Identity Designer — Logo & Full Identity System for Nonprofit (Strategy Complete)

Brand Identity Designer — Logo & Full Identity System for Nonprofit (Strategy Complete) About the project: Jumpstart is a nonprofit that connects high school students, particularly those not headed to a four-year college, with real, paid work in automotive, hospitality, manufacturing, and IT. Our flagship program is Draft Day, a sports-draft-style hiring event where prepared students meet employers and often receive hiring decisions within weeks. We’re rebranding. The strategy work is already done, and we’re looking for a designer to build the visual identity on top of it. What already exists: You will not be starting from a blank page or a vague brief. We can share on our first call: • A complete brand platform mission, vision, positioning, messaging pillars, voice and tone • Three audience personas with defined pain points and messaging • Three semi developed visual directions, with typography, color, imagery • Existing video assets in the brand’s world Your job is to take a decided direction and build it into a real, usable identity system. Deliverables: Logo suite • Primary logo / wordmark • Secondary logo/alternate • Horizontal and stacked lockups • Boxed logo variant (signage, decals, hard-wearing surfaces) • One-color and reversed versions • Social avatar and favicon crops • Clear-space and minimum-size rules Service marks • Locked-up marks for four sub-brands: Draft Day (flagship), Apprenticeships, Internships, Mentorships • A rule set for how sub-brands relate to the parent System • Final color palette: primary and secondary, with hex, RGB, CMYK, Pantone • Typography system: licensed typefaces, full type scale, usage rules • Icon set: 8–12 icons, consistent grammar, built for the brand • Application examples: partnership one-pager, event signage, business card, welcome packet, social templates Documentation • Brand guidelines document, PDF • All source files, packaged and organized: Illustrator or Figma, plus outlined vector logos (AI, EPS, SVG, PNG) • Full ownership of the final work transfers to us We are not a polished, corporate, or premium-feeling brand, and we don’t want to become one. The people we’re speaking to are shop owners, plant supervisors, CTE teachers, and sixteen-year-olds. The work needs to feel real, grounded, and legible to those people not refined. How you’ll work with us: You’ll work largely independently, with a small team on our side and one clear point of contact. • Day-to-day contact and creative lead: [your name] you’ll work directly with me (Ellie) on everything. I’ll give consolidated feedback; you won’t be chasing opinions from five people. • Final approval: our founder. She sees work at concept and at lock, not in between. • Brand strategy questions: our brand strategist is available if something in the platform needs interpreting. • Cadence: one 30-minute call per week, US Mountain Time, plus async review in Figma or email between calls. *You will not be designing by committee. Feedback comes from one person, consolidated, in writing. Where we’d value your expertise: The strategy is settled. These are the places we’re genuinely looking for you to lead and to push back on us: • Drawing the actual mark. What we’ve developed are typographic studies, not finished logos. The craft of the mark is yours. • Brand architecture. Draft Day is our flagship and carries real equity. We have a view on how it should relate to the parent brand, but we’d like yours. • Production reality. How the mark holds up in vinyl, embroidery, single-color print, and signage on a shop wall. We’d rather hear the constraint from you now than discover it later. • Typeface licensing on a nonprofit budget, including web and desktop. • Making it usable by non-designers. After handoff there is no designer on staff. The system has to survive being applied by people without design training that should shape how you build it, and we’d like your thinking on it. Who we’re looking for: • Experience designing brand identity systems, not just logos • Experience in industrial, trade, civic, education, or nonprofit sectors or a clear argument for why your background transfers • Comfortable executing against someone else’s strategy rather than restarting it • Available for a weekly 30-minute call in US Mountain Time • The person we hire is the person doing the work. If you’re applying as an agency, tell us who will actually be designing and confirm they’ll be on every call. Please don’t apply if… • Your portfolio is entirely luxury, beauty, or DTC e-commerce • You use AI-generated logo tools or stock/template marks • You can’t share source files or transfer ownership • You’re planning to hand this to a subcontractor we won’t meet Budget & timeline: Fixed price, dependent on experience and scope fit. Milestones: 1. Discovery call + direction review 2. Logo concepts (2–3 routes) 3. Refinement to a single mark 4. Stylescape, full system, service marks, icons, applications 5. Guidelines document + file handoff To apply… Please include: 1. Two identity systems you built end-to-end — not single logos. We want to see how you handled sub-brands, applications, and guidelines. 2. One piece of work that had to feel unpolished or utilitarian on purpose, and a sentence on what made that hard. 3. Your answer to this: we can’t show vehicles, roads, or speed imagery, but automotive is one of our four sectors. How would you approach identity and imagery for that sector within that constraint? 4. Your availability and your fixed price for the scope above.