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Speaking Place: Identity
Logo & Visual Branding, Messaging Strategy
Speaking Place is a language revitalization nonprofit that began supporting community language projects in 2010. Under new all-Indigenous leadership, the organization narrowed its scope to a specific, urgent mission: Passamaquoddy language revitalization.
After we finished this project, they asked us to redesign their website using the new branding.
01 / The Challenge
The branding lacked any specific connection to the Passamaquoddy people, the language, or the territory. The identity needed to honor cultural heritage and communicate the high stakes of the work.
Without a culturally-centered brand, the organization’s new leadership, refined mission, and critical funding goals would remain invisible to the community and donors they needed to reach.
“[We are] so in love with this logo and the entire brand kit. I cannot thank you enough for your work on this.”
— Bri “Sipsis” Smith, Director, Speaking Place
02 / The Process
Honoring an Indigenous Artist
Rather than creating a concept from scratch, our role was to refine an original Wabanaki artwork into a functional, scalable logo system.
The finalized mark clarifies the artist’s visual concept to directly communicate the organization’s key components of their language work.
03 / The Result
A cultural mark that becomes more than a logo.
Unlike the original text-only identity, the new mark integrates Passamaquoddy text directly into the logo which elevates the language itself to the face of the brand.
The identity now serves as an immediate, clear statement of the organization’s mission. Passamaquoddy language revitalization isn’t a footnote to the work, it leads the work.
04 / The Impact
Donation traffic doubled
within three months of the new brand redesign going live.
When an organization’s visual identity finally matches its mission, funders and donors no longer have to translate the value because they can see it reflected in every touchpoint.
For Speaking Place, that meant a mark that speaks the same language as the people it serves, and a community that recognized itself in it.
When the final brand was presented to the Speaking Place team and Wabanaki artists, the response wasn’t a long list of revisions. It was this:
“No words. This is so beautiful. This is so nice. Wə̀liwəni.
— Wabanaki artist, on first seeing the final brand
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