Love Your Story
Helping a 501(c)3 provide respite for families in the disability community
BRAND DESIGN INTENSIVE, SQUARESPACE WEB DESIGN — Gainesville, Georgia
(Love your Story was granted a pro bono project from Telltale.)
Brand Evolution
Where Love Your Story Began…
Founder Abigail Burle is a mom of triplets. Her babies were born at 24 weeks in 2017 (and for the five years since then), Abigail and her husband Ryan noticed a gap in the organizations that provide for families affected by disabilities and recognized a need for rest in this community. The idea started with Molly’s House, a home in Gainesville, GA where people visiting for medical care could stay, free of charge. Seeing the huge need that house filled, the vision has grown much bigger and bolder.
Where Love Your Story Is Headed…
The organization officially got its 501(c)3 status in 2022 and defined some more concrete goals for the future. There are three arms to Love Your Story: respite housing, building community, and education. They want to expand to other cities, run programs to help families impacted by disabilities connect with other families walking the same path, and educate the larger community about ways to help their neighbors. This brand needs to set them up for the big goals they are chasing.
Brand Keywords
Belonging — Restoration — Healing
Target Audience
As with any nonprofit, there are two audiences for a brand + website: the people the organization serves and the people who donate to the cause. These are almost always completely separate people groups, so the job of the brand is to find the common tie.
The thread that runs through both of these audiences is the understanding of the difficulty these families face. For the families LYS serves, they live it. For the people who donate, they have taken the time to understand the struggle and learn about it. They might have close relationships with families who are impacted by disabilities or they have just recently learned about how housing is not provided to families who need a long-term solution.
LYS is intentional about not using people’s stories or sadness as clickbait. They want real relationships and happy outcomes to drive donations, so their brand and communication focuses on building a sense of belonging.
Visual Rationale
When diving into this visual identity, our goal was to create a visual identity representative of the respite that Love Your Story offers to families with disabilities. It’s designed to feel pulled together, but calm and welcoming at the same time. We leaned into restful tones of blue and green that evoke feelings of rest and peace, while utilizing a simple, but personality-filled serif typeface to bring balance.
Knowing that the brand will grow in the future, we create a typographic-driven logo suite so that the brand can be paired with illustrations representing the homes and other branches of the organization. We wanted the identity to feel inclusive and trustworthy, but ultimately focused on the families they serve more than the organization itself.
If you’ve made it this deep into our site, you probably already know that collaboration is our favorite. This project was a team effort with the help of Green Chair Stories on copywriting.