brand + identity

digital marketing

graphic design

wordpress website

Vancouver, BC

VRS Communities is a Vancouver-based non-profit organization that advocates and provides services for persons with disabilities, seniors, and affordable housing families. With the recent growth of VRS our goal was to create a consistent visual identity across all divisions and locations, taking over a dozen different brand systems and consolidating it into one unified market presence. We spent the first month of this project deep diving into the roots of the organization and its incredible story of resilience and inspiration. We surveyed their employees and stakeholders, collecting data to help guide our design process. We hosted a full day brand seminar with key team members to dig into the brand personality and what’s next for VRS and arrived at some key conclusions as to what we needed to achieve in the design phase, including:

1. Challenge the stigma that non-profit = non-quality. VRS carries itself with the warmth and compassion of a non-profit with the spirit of an invested business model. VRS answers to people, not shareholders.
2. Position VRS more boldly as a leader in affordable housing, a visionary for the future.
3. Communicate how VRS supports the growth of the collective and the individual.
4. Highlight the story of the organization and its 50 year history of making the impossible, possible.
5. Communicate the authentic loyalty, care, and dedication of VRS’s employees in every client experience.

These guiding principles ultimately brought us to the design you see here, created with notes of stability and nature Rooted with a corporate visual identity, while staying warm and compassionate in its brand essence. A feeing of inspiration and possibility. That VRS sees potential in every person regardless of their age, ability, or life setbacks. We then proceeded to roll out this identity across all 11 seniors locations, including a custom WordPress website for vrs.org and each individual seniors’ website.