Creating Scopio’s Brand Identity
Designing a brand that effectively communicates Scopio’s mission of telling the world’s stories through photography, in a way that looks bold, modern, and embodied.
Overview
Scopio is a community-based platform and marketplace where photographers and artists can share images and stories from around the world, connect with a community of like minded artists, and access opportunities that allow them to get paid for their work. The company was founded in New York in 2014 by myself and Christina Hawatmeh. When the Arab Spring started, we saw the volume and speed at which photo sharing was happening on social media but there wasn’t a way for news organizations who were disseminating this content to properly license these photos. With the help of the Data Science Institute at Columbia, Christina started collecting photos of global social movements based on popular hashtags, and called the initiative Protestify. I joined the project shortly after as a co-founder, to lead the creative direction and design vision for the company as well as the digital products we offer.
Together, we created a platform to connect people who were documenting social movements and sharing them on social media platforms to news outlets looking to tell these types of stories. With the help of an engineering team, we started training machine learning models and used natural language processing to create a search engine that aggregates photos from social media platforms. News organizations that want to use the photos would then send permission to the photographer to license and publish them.
In 2017, we pivoted Protestify, the search engine, to become Scopio, the photography storytelling platform and marketplace. This provided organizations direct access to images and stories from around the world. The team grew into 12 people today, and is made up of photographers, engineers, designers, content creators, and innovators who want to reshape image sharing and storytelling globally. Scopio has over 1M+ images on its platform shared by 14,000+ artists from 150+ countries, and 18,000+ customers.
Design Challenge
Scopio’s mission is to elevate human stories told by people from underrepresented identities, challenge visual stereotypes, and give opportunities to emerging photographers and artists to monetize their work and get hired. We wanted to challenge the traditional photojournalism industry that perpetuates the colonial gaze and hire a small pool of professional photojournalists mainly from Western countries to parachute into other countries and cover local issues they often know little or nothing about. Scopio takes a more grounded approach to photojournalism by providing a platform for people of different origins, skill levels, and access to tell their own stories and own the rights to their images.
Process
Discovery & Market Research
We did a lot of internal brainstorming to develop a unified brand vision. We did exercises to understand our goals, target audience, brand values, and competitive landscape. Then we delved into a competitive analysis to identify and understand the visual language in the image landscape.
Brand Development
I wanted to create a brand that effectively communicates this mission in a way that looks bold, simple, modern, and embodied. With our team, we brainstormed our core brand identity and values, then with the help of a creative agency, came up with a final design for our brand.
Identity
Bold: Giving voice to underrepresented groups, who bring audiences closer to the truth. Local and real influencers.
Authentic: Genuine and real personality. Unpretentious.
Storyteller: Loves to tell stories and document realities.
Edgy: Artists who feel comfortable in taking risks and are praised for doing so.
Modern & Young: Encourage modern and forward thinkers/thinking, embracing new concepts and ideas.
Feminine: Emotional topics, unafraid of expression, encourage opinion sharing in a nurturing environment, collective, family. Experts in constructive communication and witty.
Grounded: Giving support and a place of belonging to the artist communities around the world.
Inspiring: Inspires artists to share, engage, discuss and create conversations around new and societal conflicts/controversy/themes.
Values
Diversity: of images and stories, colors, traditions, and experiences.
Inclusion: of underrepresented regions and groups.
Mission-Driven: Brand’s core identity is its mission of representing untold visual stories
Transparency: Fair compensation to artists.
Belonging: Artist loyalty and a sense of belonging to a community that they can identify with.
Visual Exploration
Version 1
Version 2
Deliverables
After we had developed a brand that perfectly communicates our mission and values, I developed the brand guidelines, including the color palette, typography, and other associated components.
Social Content
To ensure that the company’s social accounts represent the new brand identity and mission, I gave creative direction and worked with our video editor and content team on creating the social content, through posts, videos, and overall content. Most of the content on our Instagram and our Youtube channels, before August 2022, were designed and edited under my creative direction and guidance.