Enlisting the help of brilliant art students, marketing behemoth
The Arras logo isn’t a random green doodle on a piece of paper.
Yaxi Xiao, a Chinese student at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, designed the logo last spring after the Arras Foundation’s branding project was selected for the school’s free marketing program in a worldwide competition.
“This was a really big deal for us,” said Susan DeVenny, president of the Arras Foundation. “One nonprofit organization is picked every semester, and that becomes the classes’ semester-long project.”
Foundation board member Ashley Shannon first conceived the idea behind the Arras name.
Shannon and the rest of the foundation’s branding committee spent months kicking around ideas that would reflect both the foundation’s mission and a sense of place.
The Arras logo isn’t a random green doodle on a piece of paper.
Yaxi Xiao, a Chinese student at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, designed the logo last spring after the Arras Foundation’s branding project was selected for the school’s free marketing program in a worldwide competition.
“This was a really big deal for us,” said Susan DeVenny, president of the Arras Foundation. “One nonprofit organization is picked every semester, and that becomes the classes’ semester-long project.”
Foundation board member Ashley Shannon first conceived the idea behind the Arras name.
Shannon and the rest of the foundation’s branding committee spent months kicking around ideas that would reflect both the foundation’s mission and a sense of place.
“My thoughts kept returning to the image/idea of a beautiful, strong tapestry – a thick fabric that could be symbolic of our diverse population – while also paying homage to our past as a strong textile community,” Shannon said.
She used the internet to generate words connected to the idea of a tapestry and came across arras – a rich tapestry that originated in the northern French city of Arras.
“We knew we had found our new name,” said Shannon, director of marketing and community relations at MUSC Health-Lancaster. “You really have to credit Google.”
That’s when the School of Visual Arts in New York got involved.
You might not be familiar with the school or Yaxi’s name, but you see the work of its instructors almost every day.
Yaxi was one of 14 handpicked students in a class taught by Tom Geismar and Sagi Haviv.
The marketing firm of Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv has designed some of the world’s most recognizable logos, including Xerox, PBS, Mobil Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank and the U.S. Open Tennis Championships.
“They are big-time talent, and this is how they pay it forward,” DeVenny said. “They teach this class every semester.”
Fourteen students worked on the Arras logo and competed among themselves for five months to come up with the best idea and brand. Each student, DeVenny said, had to whittle 15 ideas to one, though the foundation actually chose Yaxi’s design from among 18 submissions.
“They really did a lot of research on us,” DeVenny said. “One of our values is working with young adults and helping them make the transition into adulthood. It was very aligned with our mission.”
Once the submissions were ready, three members of the Arras board flew to New York in April 2019 for student presentations.
“They did their pitch and the instructors made us vote right there in front of them,” DeVenny said. “It was hard, but the teachers were saying this is what they will get in real life. They need to understand that marketing can be cut-throat business.”
The foundation trustees returned to Lancaster with four designs, including Yaxi’s, to choose from. Her design was the choice of the branding committee, as well as the foundation’s board and staff.
“We kept coming back to something that symbolizes the weaving of all perspectives together,” DeVenny said.
Yaxi, already an award-winning graphic designer and animator, described her design as a single stroke – at once dynamic and firm, but also soft – to convey a progressive change that ends with a continuous rising movement.
“The handwritten form of the big ‘A’ gives it a less mechanic feeling,” she wrote. “Instead, it keeps a warm sense of human and nostalgia, reflecting the fundamental characteristic of the Arras Foundation….
“I try to make the logo approachable, highly recognizable, and, most importantly, seamlessly compatible” with the organization it represents.
Follow reporter Greg Summers on Twitter @GregSummersTLN or contact him at (803) 283-1156.
This article was first published in The Lancaster News.