Plenty of founders with strong ideas never get a fair hearing, because of who they are rather than what they’re building. UNSEEN Impact is Outfly’s own initiative to change that. Its mission is “transforming unseen potential into unstoppable impact by empowering underserved founders to overcome industry biases and gain equitable access to funding and resources”.
The brand had to speak to three groups at once: diverse, female and solo founders, investors interested in ethical, impactful ventures, and a startup community looking for fresh perspectives. The brief asked for a personality that is bold and unafraid to challenge the status quo, empathetic towards the challenges these founders face, and forward-thinking and action-oriented.
We ran it as a brand sprint, following our double diamond method: research and moodboarding, sketching and ideation, a shortlist of routes, then deeper exploration of that shortlist before a final decision. The logo brief was clear. It had to capture unseen potential being recognised and celebrated, suggest vision, clarity and transformation, and stay bold, simple and easy to recognise.
Sprint 1 produced three routes: Celebrating Diverse Founders & Perspectives, Opening Blind Eyes and Revealing the Unseen, which we then refined in a second round. Among the directions we explored, the idea of sight kept coming back: the word IMPACT set inside an eye cut through the letters of UNSEEN, the two e’s of unseen closed into sleeping eyes, and a series of 3D renders in which a glass lens passes over the wordmark, bending and splitting the letters it touches.
The eye direction grew into a fuller identity system. The stacked UNSEEN wordmark, with IMPACT set inside an eye, was tried across colourways led by cyan, orange, lime and magenta, on black and on colour. Around it we drew a set of bold icons, from eyes and bursts to flowers, diamonds, targets and triangles, that tile into a modular grid. Each of the four brand pillars, Purpose-powered, Innovative instinct, Diversity drives us and Ethical engine, has its own symbol.
A sign-off line, Activated by Outfly, ties the initiative back to its parent brand. We then mocked the system up on hanging banners, mugs and T-shirts to see how it holds up away from the screen.
A brand for founders who get overlooked has to work where people actually see it, so we put the routes into realistic mockups. The closed-eye direction became a billboard that pairs the unseen impact wordmark with the line Diversity Drives Us and the mission statement, beside a pattern of sleeping eyes with one pair wide open.
The eye and closed-eye directions were also mocked up on tote bags, building banners, water bottles, mugs, T-shirts and lanyards, so they could be judged side by side at a realistic scale.
Outfly, a London brand, marketing and product agency, ran the brand sprint for UNSEEN Impact, an initiative Outfly set up itself, in late 2023.
An Outfly initiative to help underserved founders, including diverse, female and solo founders, overcome industry biases and gain equitable access to funding and resources.
Among the directions explored in UNSEEN Impact’s brand sprint: the word IMPACT set inside an eye, a wordmark whose e’s close into sleeping eyes, and 3D renders of a glass lens bending the letters of the name.
Through a double diamond brand sprint: research and moodboarding, sketching and ideation, a shortlist of three routes, then a second round of refinement to explore them further.
