
A brand refresh for Arizona’s largest provider of services for people with special needs.
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Have you heard of those extreme theatre events in which a play is written, rehearsed, and performed, all within 24 hours? The resulting shows are generally surprisingly good, hilarious, and inspiring. Years ago, I participated in a few of these events in Taos, New Mexico: “Gorilla Theatre!”, having a blast and meeting new people. So when I learned about the CreateAthon event being put on by the Arizona chapter of the American Institute for Graphic Design (AIGA), I had to jump on it.
: : Hmmmm, what if we pulled an all-nighter doing marketing for nonprofits?” : :
CreateAthon is a wonderful national organization started in 1998 by two women who thought, “Hmmmm, what if we pulled an all-nighter doing marketing for nonprofits?” Since then, every year, they have galvanized thousands of creative professionals and supported hundreds of nonprofits in their fundraising efforts. I couldn’t resist this opportunity for a deep dive into design for a good cause, with a team of like-minded, design-hungry fools.
How it works: One person is designated as the design team lead, and is put together with a nonprofit. The week before the event, the lead reviews their organization and its materials, meets and discusses goals, then formulates a concept and direction for the work to be done in creating marketing materials for their fundraising efforts. The morning of the event, the nonprofit and the team meet up to review the concept and direction, then the clock begins!
I was eager to be involved in their story. Since I was new to town, I decided immediately that I would personally commit to staying with the relationship, even after the CreateAthon was over, and help finish developing and producing the work.
CreateAthon 2020
Arizona AIGA put me together with the nonprofit ACCEL, an organization that serves people with all levels of special needs. Energetic, bright Jesse Bustamante, Chief Advancement Officer for ACCEL, explained: “We provide exceptional educational, behavioral, therapeutic, and vocational programs for individuals with special needs—ages 5 to 22. We work with the most incredible people—they just need some help.” It was easy to be infected by the passion these people have for their work!
The following project log tells the beginning of our story:
TEAM ACCEL : : PROJECT LOG
Desert Stardate 30.IX. 2020.
Team members: AIGA members Julia Henzerling (team lead), Tommy Kolwalski, Denisse Leon, Quinn Vasquez.
Nonprofit clients: ACCEL Chief Advancement Officer, Jesse Bustamante; ACCEL Director of Development, Bethany Eggleston.
Team ACCEL (left, right, top to bottom): Tommy, Jules, Bethany, Jessie, Denisse, Quinn.

: : We all agreed that…their visual voice doesn’t reflect the deeply human services of care they perform every day. : :
TEAM ACCEL was already blowing up Slack channels from the week before the CreateAthon event, getting excited to jump into the work. On that Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we met on Zoom to meet each other and look at Accel’s materials, after Jules met with Bethany and Jessie earlier in the week. We all agreed that, while we know they need fundraising takeaways, their entire look is fraught with issues—their visual voice doesn’t reflect deeply human services of care they perform every day.
We began looking at the website structure and messing around with a new logo, expanded color palette and visual system. We decided on three deliverables: revised organization and a new look to the website, an email marketing campaign, and a print takeaway piece specifically for donors. Or as close to that as we could get!
We actually cheated a bit, and did a fair amount of this work on the logo and palette, before Saturday’s event. The creative direction was boiled down to these objectives:
Creative direction:
Upon review of branding and website, we agreed that:
* the logo was too severe and collegiate-looking—doesn’t communicate the vibrancy of Accel’s atmosphere;
* the color palette is too reminiscent of ASU; need an expanded palette; too masculine
* the website structure and visual hierarchy needs a lot of clarity.
Besides the overall freshening of the brand—and revised logo and word mark, we hope to plan for:
1) a revised website visual design with complete, more succinct content and elements organized for better understanding. Audience primarily clients, parents and caregivers, with a subpage for donor information.
2) a takeaway print piece for potential donors with impact stats and key Accel values
3) a template for email marketing campaign
Throughout the development of these materials, we will be focusing on freshening the brand with a brighter and expanded color palette, a visual system that integrates with existing photography, consistent typography, and a revised wordmark. Our goal is a more humanistic feel that is inviting to these families in difficult situations.


We explored a refreshed logo design and expanded color palette, hoping to engender a more human feel.


CreateAthon check-ins every few hours kept the adrenaline going—in fact, we had to excuse ourselves from some check-ins as we were totally immersed in solving problems with the client. It was kind of humorously traumatic to be in mid-sentence, then suddenly find yourself plucked remotely by the event master, Nicole, and placed in another Zoom with different faces, just like in Star Trek.
Everyone got cookies from Jessie and Bethany! Well everyone except me, somehow the GrubHub person couldn’t find me in my cave here in Scottsdale…
Rockin’ and rollin’
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Denisse brilliantly distilled Accel’s value statements from existing copy, helping streamline the target messaging to donors, and sets key elements for the brochure. Then she continued to put the brand book together and sketch more collateral with our newly-developed visual system.
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Tommy and Quinn attacked the website structure using a tool called Octopus, to weed out duplicate pages and refine the flow of the information. Then those madmen blasted off with home page concepts and drilling down into page designs, utilizing the new color palette and exploring visual solutions.
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Jules dove into the four themes for reaching out to donors and drafted copy for an email marketing campaign, then designed layout variations for both the email and the brochure, using our new visual system.
Things were getting nutty by 11pm and beyond that, it was just a bleary-eyed race to roll out as many pages for the fundraising, collateral and the website as possible, tightening up the overall visual voice as we work. We had a final check-in with our clients, then throughout the night and into the morning, we mostly just kept sketching until we ran out of time.

Denisse guides the client through an exercise in refining their value statement (above), and email, website, and collateral design in development (below).

: : Things were getting nutty by 11pm…beyond that, it was just a bleary-eyed race to roll out as many sketches for the fundraising, collateral and the website as possible. : :

Final presentation at 8:40am! What great fun to see all the work done by the teams. We took turns presenting the deliverables for Accel, and enjoyed supportive comments—especially from Jessie and Bethany.
Post CreateAthon, we are finalizing the email marketing and taking steps to revise the website. The rollout of the new logo and visual system will take a lot of political handling with the internal leadership team, as well as more refinements. The most exciting thing is that Jessie and Bethany are essentially change agents within Accel—so there is a good chance we can successfully refresh this brand within the year.
Brand standards, summarized:
…and on, and on…
One year later, and my relationship with ACCEL continues in any form that is possible—given the nature of being a volunteer, their ever-shifting priorities, and more pressing deadlines. Thanks to Jesse’s hard work getting buy-in from the leadership team, we have rolled out the new logo and visual system. We redesigned and reorganized the website (with many refinements still in progress), and invigorated the email and social marketing efforts with the new look. Everyone seems to be really excited about it. Their marketing firm is working with the brand guidelines, new signage has been ordered, and many other manifestations of the brand refresh are underway.
Because I do some writing for Arizona AIGA, an organizations for design professionals, I became acquainted with the tee shirt company StateFortyEight and the StateFortyEight Foundation, whose business model is to give back to the community with every sale. I got them together with ACCEL, and Bethany Eggleston gave us a virtual tour of the school. It was exciting to forge this connection and we hope to see some ways that SFE and ACCEL can collaborate.


A tour around Accel campus included a visit to the student’s tee shirt print shop at the school.

This gentleman, running the school café, showed us how important it is to manage the temperature of the candy bars here in Arizona. He is now a graduate and has achieved his dream of working at a monster truck rally company in Houston.