Services
Brand Strategy, Logo and Visual Identity
Sector
Nonprofit/Education & History
The HistoryMakers was founded to address the lack of documentation and preservation of the African American historical record. Untold personal stories, both well-known and unsung, risked being lost entirely. The HistoryMakers set out to solve this one person at a time, capturing video testimonials that reveal the broad scope of African American men and women who have shaped American life, history, and culture across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and building a priceless collection that gives each of them their rightful place in history.
Impact
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Increase in contributions and grants in the rebrand year
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Program service revenue
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Total revenue growth
Brand Vision
Many African American contributions to society have gone largely untold and unrecorded, and as a result remain largely unknown. They are America’s Missing Stories. Substance built the brand strategy around a single idea: writing and righting African Americans into history. A compass shape is incorporated into the wordmark, signaling both a change in direction and a path toward the future, one that is more equitable and inclusive of these narratives.
The identity gave The HistoryMakers a visual language equal to the scale of the archive itself, one built to carry the weight of a collection that now holds over 3,800 stories of influential figures in politics, art, science, and culture and is housed permanently in the Library of Congress, with access extended to 205 colleges and universities nationwide.
The rebrand gave The HistoryMakers a platform strong enough to match its national significance, positioning the organization not just as an archive, but as a movement to correct the historical record. As the collection continues to grow, it remains a vital resource for researchers, students, and educators nationwide, with the identity now representing an institution recognized alongside the nation’s most important historical archives
