Dharma Voices for Animals
BRANDING, WEBSITE
The Project
Since 2011, Dharma Voices for Animals (DVA) has been committed to advocating for animals within Buddhist communities. What began as a group of friends concerned about the dissonance between Buddha’s teachings and the practice of consuming animals, grew into the only international animal advocacy group engaging Buddhists across the globe. Their brand and website needed to reflect this evolution and better serve them for the years to come.
Our Approach
We looked to DVA’s original branding to see which elements could be carried forward to keep their existing legacy alive. We took stock of which brand aspects were the most challenging for the DVA team to use in their daily work (such as the color palette) and came up with a plan to address them. We worked alongside DVA to understand which Buddhist symbolism would resonate most with their major target audiences – Buddhist communities, and the broader non-Buddhist animal advocacy community.
Logo Redesign
DVA’s previous logo presented numerous functional challenges such as lack of scalability, limited color variations, and more. While DVA’s original members were attached to their original logo, they knew a change was needed to see the organization into the future. We helped determine which brand elements were most important to bring forward, so the new look wouldn’t feel like a total abandoning of their legacy. In the end, we determined the overall color palette, circular shape, and variety of animals represented in the logo were the key elements to include.
One thing strongly missing from the logo was a representation of Buddhism. DVA’s work lies at the intersection between animal advocacy and Buddhist communities, and this needed to be instantly clear in the logo to represent their unique offering.
We worked alongside DVA to understand which Buddhist symbols would resonate most with their major target audiences – Buddhist communities, and the broader non-Buddhist animal advocacy community. While there are many Buddhist symbols that strongly relate to DVA’s mission of protecting animals, such as the abhaya mudra (hand of protection), those symbols were less clearly “Buddhist” than iconic symbols such as the lotus flower, which is instantly recognizable.
The result is a modern, clean and functional logo with a clear identity that instantly communicates DVA’s mission for animals.
Brand Identity
For the Primary color palette, we addressed DVA’s challenges with color contrast by darkening the purple tone to a less vibrant eggplant color, and introducing more light, neutral tones to calm down the palette overall. In the Secondary palette, we introduced two soft, cool tones to use in illustrations and on other materials where the mood required a more zen feel. We also introduced a dark gray to associate with the Bodhi Project, which is more serious in nature.
We looked for other opportunities to incorporate other Buddhist symbolism, and created several illustrations for DVA to use on the website, other collateral, and merchandise for fundraising. The illustrations are inspired by traditional woodblock prints.
Primary
Secondary
Website Design
DVA’s previous website presented many UX challenges and didn’t reflect the truly impactful nature of their work. We worked with DVA to reorganize their website’s sitemap and content, streamlined the user experience, and incorporated their new brand along with some subtle animations.
Bodhi Project
Since education is central to DVA’s mission, they wanted a website section revealing the conflict between animal suffering and Buddhist teachings. We designed a serious-toned section with a consent-based interactive feature, allowing users to choose to “open their eyes” and unblur potentially disturbing images.
“Our organization Dharma Voices for Animals has been contemplating a logo and website revival for over two years now. Our fears of lack of brand recognition and hesitancy to change were all made easy by Kate Rodman and the team at Violet Studios. They handled all of our concerns with such care and genuine concern. The entire process was so incredible from start to finish. The team were very communicative and made what could have been a long and stressful process very exciting and enjoyable. From the new logo to our new website, our network is thoroughly impressed as are we. They went above and beyond our expectations, even creating special illustrations that we can use! There is no way we could have done all this without Violet Studios and we are eternally grateful for their hard work in making our brand revamp not only possible, but joyful! ”