Bright futures

With a tradition of fleeting summers, the UK’s mainstay of overcast gloom is only made worse by a woeful glance at a calendar of frosty months ahead. Yet as the sun goes to work in faraway places, brand consultancy Designhouse’s new identity for children’s charity, SOL Foundation, brings vibrant sunshine to the forefront of the growing initiative

Standing for Sports, Opportunities and Lives, the foundation focuses on developing opportunities for underprivileged children in India and Africa. Set up in Liechtenstein in May 2015, the charity’s projects have included the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), establishing a work-readiness curriculum into weekly football leagues in deprived parts of the Kenyan suburb.

Along with this, education remains a key focus for the charity. The ‘Moving the Goalposts’ project incorporates 2,000 weekly football games in the coastal town of Kilifi, Kenya. Offering jobs and training for over 5,000 girls, the project’s mission to educate girls about HIV/AIDS remains a focal point of the work.

Designhouse delivered the new identity with vibrancy and colour as a driving force to the design. Incorporating a Venn diagram into the principal logo, the implementation of colourful cut-out patterns evokes the abstract works of the late French artist, Henri Matisse, an inspiration for the artwork. Designhouse took on the project with high hopes, saying, “Designing a brand for a new charity was a truly rewarding and stimulating project for our team… The brief was to deliver a solution that was happy and engaging, and could be translated and reproduced locally with basic materials and equipment.”

The new identity gives the charity a positive outlook towards future projects as the region continues to develop, with expansion on the horizon, SOL’s partners include the Naz Foundation (India) Trust, Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, and the Women Win Foundation among many other growing co-operation initiatives to tackle problems within the region.