U.S. government brand identities are a mixed bag. Once you’ve put the NASA meatball and National Park Service badge on a special shelf, you’re left with a voluminous aerie of eagles, and a smattering of official marks that all look perfectly official . . . and, ultimately, entirely forgettable.
Which is a problem if you’re trying to rally younger generations around a new idea—like, say, the American Climate Corps, which formally launched today with the debut of its new website and jobs program. How do you brand it?
“Design has an incredible power, and it is something that can make a big difference in whether something succeeds,” says Loyalkaspar executive creative director Anna Minkkinen, whose team worked on the initiative alongside the White House. “And this particular issue has struggled to gain a foothold—people don’t know how to cope with this situation, and how to do something actionable and tangible.”
President Biden signed an executive order to create a “civilian climate corps” in his first week of office, which eventually coalesced into the announcement of the American Climate Corps last September. The stated goal was to train and put 20,000 young people to work in jobs tied to clean energy and climate resistance. At the State of the Union in March, Biden vowed to triple that number—and likened the project to AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps. But it’s actually modeled on a much older idea: the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a Depression-era work program for out-of-work young men that was part of FDR’s New Deal, known for its significant infrastructure projects across the country and its work on the National Park system.
And that’s where the team found their Climate Corps branding.
“It is a very different time [today],” says Frances Maggie Thomas, special assistant to the president for climate, office of domestic climate policy at the White House. “We have a very different crisis that we are trying to tackle—but we have a whole new diverse generation of young people who are ready to be put to work.”
The team started by studying the original CCC logo, with its central landscape and tree iconography, as well as other CCC imagery—notably, a badge with a green tree at its center, framed by a common type treatment of the era.
The team eschewed the corporate vibes of many government logos and avoided an uber-patriotic red, white, and blue palette, which data has shown the next generation doesn’t really embrace, says Loyalkaspar principal and chief creative officer Beat Baudenbacher. Instead, the designers leaned into the past, starting with that CCC tree. It became the central image of the new logo, geometrically shooting skyward to indicate progress as well as urgency. The trunk, meanwhile, is designed to convey a sense of resilience and infrastructure, with the ground beneath it—which Thomas says could be interpreted as water, a salt marsh, any foundation, really—invoking nature-based solutions to our climate problems.
And finally, there are the windmills, included here to represent clean energy. While tiny, they’re perhaps a bold inclusion, given that they have become politically charged thanks to Republican talking points and a previous president who decried them for everything from causing cancer (they don’t) to killing whales (the whales are perfectly safe, and perhaps enjoying a gentle breeze). While they might have made for a divisive primary icon in place of the tree, Baudenbacher says the team didn’t shy away from them as a secondary image here—after all, it’s not as easy to geometrically depict a solar panel.
As for the type, which so nicely mimics the extended faces of the 1930s, Baudenbacher designed it himself for the project, and even worked it into a font for the larger brand ecosystem. That system also features primary fonts including Fairweather and Mundial—a palette of National Park-named colors (from Arches Red to Acadia Green), and, most notably, an illustration style that pays homage to Civilian Conservation Corps–era posters with its balance of contemporary and retro touches like desaturated hues, tone-on-tone shadows, contrasting line thickness, radiating tapered lines, and so on.
An illustration of a hand became a recurring motif within it—a hand holding a wind turbine, a hand wielding a lightning bolt—which Minkkinen says is all about the idea of agency. She notes that when it comes to the state of climate change today, the hand represents tangible results—that people can actually make a difference in the face of great challenge. Like, say, how the New Deal made people feel in the wake of the Great Depression.
“It’s [about] wanting to reclaim things from the past that we’ve lost. Or, like a commitment to nature, a commitment to community,” she says. “The nostalgia part of it [conveys that] Yeah, we’ve done this before—we’ve come together before to make things happen and to fix things in our country.”
Ultimately, more than any aesthetics, the team wanted to capture a vibe: hope.
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