Services
Brand Strategy, Naming, Logo and Visual Identity
Sector
Nonprofit/Human Services
Becky and Lester Knight have been generous and active funders in Chicago for years. Community building, human services, education, health. They show up across the board, and they show up as real partners to the organizations they support. The name Knight Family Foundation didn’t reflect any of that. Foundation reads as passive, institutional, removed. And with several high-profile Knight foundations already in the world, there was a real differentiation problem on top of it. They needed a new name and brand that not only spoke to their values but set them apart and told a compelling narrative about what they do and why they do it.
Impact
The Knight Impact Partners name and identity gave the foundation a clearer public presence and a stronger platform for the partnerships at the center of its work. The rebrand reframed the foundation’s role in Chicago’s philanthropic landscape, moving from a name that read as institutional to one that reflects how Becky and Lester Knight actually operate: as active partners, not passive funders.
+$ 0 М
Granted to Chicago nonprofits annually
+$ 0 M
Assets dedicated to the mission
0 %
of every dollar spent goes directly to grantees
Brand Vision
Substance developed the name Knight Impact Partners. It keeps the family name and legacy while putting the emphasis where it belongs: on impact, and on partnership as the engine of change.
The tagline, Investing in humanity, works on two levels. It speaks to the financial reality of philanthropy while reframing the return: not for the investor, but for the people on the receiving end.
The symbol draws from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice. The mark is a K built from two sweeping arcs flanking a vertical bar. It reads as a letterform and as something in motion: direction, momentum, deliberate change.
