The Enterprise Center

The Enterprise Center is a Philadelphia-based not-for-profit that supports minority entrepreneurs and under-resourced communities by advising and delivering on transformative economic development connected to minority business growth cycles and community wealth-building initiatives. Their work for communities in the Philadelphia area is crucial—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Enterprise Center was looking for a visual designer to help establish a cohesive brand identity in preparation for their upcoming website redesign.

In the past, they’ve had a number of freelance designers help them layout reports and advertising collateral with entirely different styles. Early on, I put together an audit of all design collateral the organization had commissioned over the past two years and tracked what colors, typefaces, and motifs were used, along with their frequency. Once I pulled that data together, I was able to work with The Enterprise Center’s stakeholders and decide how they wanted to represent themselves. The design directive the organization settled on was something modern, clean, and vibrant. The Philadelphia community is artistic and full of life, and they should represent the community they serve.

Color plays a huge role in The Enterprise Center’s brand identity. It works to distinguish the different facets of the brand, while also speaking to its roots within the Philadelphia community.

The finalized brand identity is clean, modern, and trustworthy. The Enterprise Center is organizationally broken up into three pillars: Business, Capital, and Community. Its color palette helps speak to this distinction. As a whole, The Enterprise Center is represented in its core blue hues. The Business pillar is represented by orange accents, Capital by green, and Community by teal. The color palette derives inspiration from the Philadelphia community with each proprietary color named appropriately. Aside from color, I wanted to also create a fun textural element the brand could use as a way to activate background space and add visual interest. The official pattern was inspired by Art Deco prints and was created by outlining the logomark.

The brand’s streamlined typography is both borrowed and improved. Its primary typeface is Univers, 59 Ultra Condensed—pulled directly from its logotype. I added Kulturista, a slab-serif, as the secondary typeface as a way to contrast the clean modern structure of Univers’s modern letterforms. Not only that, Philadelphia has a deep-rooted history with the printing press, and I felt incorporating a slab-serif would be an excellent way to imbue a sense of community within the brand design.

“Like many small businesses and nonprofits, it had been years since we gave our branding guide the attention it deserved, and increasingly, it was starting to show… Theresa was amazing to work with: she truly took the time to understand our needs, our goals, and our identity, and she used that to develop a branding guide that provides a strong foundation for both our physical and our digital collateral… The agencies we work with appreciate (the branding), too: I constantly get compliments on how easy it is to produce content for us because they’re able to start with Theresa’s clear, comprehensive guide! Whether your brand is due for a refresh, or you’ve never formally had one completed, I promise that you will be pleased with Theresa’s work!”

—Elizabeth McGinsky, The Enterprise Center

While I prepared the official brand guidelines for The Enterprise Center, I also worked to create several examples of collateral. I included them as examples of the extended brand system—making sure to account for both the digital and print landscape. Once stakeholders had a chance to review, they requested some of the design collateral previewed in the brand guidelines document. In addition to the completed brand guidelines and prepared assets, I also developed letterhead and business card templates, a PowerPoint template, and Zoom backgrounds.

By the end of the project, the team was delighted with their new brand standards and excited to use them moving forward.