Bringing the figure home

Why now

Two things arrived at once. The Foundation was building an entirely new web presence, and leadership was shifting the brand voice toward patients and caregivers — positioning the organization as the resource people turn to on a prostate cancer journey, rather than primarily a research funder speaking to scientists and major donors.

The identity we had was built for the second job. After several leadership transitions the strategy had moved a long way, and the brand hadn't moved with it.

What the research said

I worked with the marketing team to run donor surveys and focus groups, because I didn't want us guessing about how the brand was landing. What came back was that the voice had drifted from the audiences it was meant to reach. There was appetite to modernize, and also to reclaim something from earlier versions of the brand that people still recognized.

That gave us the brief: classic and modern, together.

The structural problem

The 2016 lockup was linear: symbol on the left, three lines of type on the right. It needed lateral space to work. Put it in a square — an app icon, a social avatar, a favicon, a shirt sleeve — and it either broke apart or shrank to illegibility. The ribbon couldn't be pulled out on its own either, because on its own it didn't say Prostate Cancer Foundation to anyone.

I rebuilt the mark as one integrated object. The figure lives inside the C rather than beside the words, so the symbol and the name occupy the same footprint instead of competing for room.

Redrawing the figure

The original figure stood upright and vertical. That posture is why it had always sat beside the type — a rigid vertical form can't nest inside a curve. I redrew it with a tilt and a lean, which gave it motion and let it occupy the counter of the C. Enough changed to feel current; enough stayed to be recognized by anyone who'd known the brand for twenty years.

Orange had been in the Foundation's palette since 2008 but absent from the mark since 2016. Restoring the figure brought it back to the center of the identity.

Aligning with leadership

My approach isn't to argue taste with executives, it's to protect function. When I could see a decision breaking in a specific application, I'd raise it concretely — here is where this fails, here is what it costs us — and we'd land on a compromise I could apply consistently across every asset. That kept the conversation on outcomes rather than opinion, and it's why the executive team handed me the full rollout.

Rolling it out

There was one real wrinkle. The brand was finished well before the website was ready, so we had a stretch of brand limbo. I ran it as a soft launch, made the transition as logical as I could for staff and external partners, and kept the digital applications flexible until the site went live.

Then the system around it: guidelines, asset library, sub-brand rules, department training, and a review pipeline where I checked externally-facing materials before publication. I also kept a full inventory of retired assets so I could systematically pull or replace them rather than hoping they'd disappear on their own.

What changed

Off-brand materials essentially stopped appearing. Departments began pulling from the asset library instead of asking me for one-offs, which sped up their turnaround and took a pile of requests off my desk. Donors and patients responded well, most visibly in email and social engagement, and the mark was registered with the USPTO in 2026.