Rethinking a Brand 56 Years in the Making
Brand Strategy | Brand Architecture | Creative Direction | Digital Experience
For 56 years, Comprehensive Youth Services has grown alongside the needs of its community — expanding from its origins in youth services into an organization spanning housing, mental health and substance use counseling, life-skills support, and community-based programs.
With that growth came complexity. Individual programs developed identities and recognition of their own, while the organization connecting them became less visible.
CYS didn't simply need a new logo. It needed to reconsider how a 56-year-old organization shows up as one connected system without losing the recognition, history, and trust built along the way.
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CYS wanted greater visibility as part of a broader strategic plan and future fundraising efforts, but strengthening the parent brand couldn’t come at the expense of program identities people already knew and trusted.
A traditional “make everything match” rebrand would have solved the visual inconsistency while potentially destroying valuable brand equity.
The real question became:
How do we make CYS recognizable as the organization behind the work while preserving the identities that already carry trust within their communities?
That shifted the project from a logo redesign into a larger brand architecture and customer-experience problem.
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Discovery revealed a disconnect between what CYS looked like and what the organization actually represented.
The existing identity was bright, highly segmented, and visually organized around its individual programs. In many ways, it functioned more like a diagram of services than a distinct parent brand.
But when leadership described the experience they wanted CYS to represent, different language emerged:
Hope. Healing. Safety. Support. Empowerment.
Those ideas connected youth housing, mental health services, substance use counseling, and community support far more effectively than the individual service categories themselves.
The opportunity was not to visually explain every program.
It was to create an umbrella brand capable of holding all of them.
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Rather than forcing the individual programs into a single visual identity, we began defining CYS as the connective layer between them.
The parent brand needed to:
Establish CYS as a recognizable organization in its own right
Clearly communicate the relationship between CYS and its programs
Preserve existing program recognition and community trust
Create a more cohesive experience for donors, partners, referral sources, and community stakeholders
Provide a scalable structure that could support greater integration over time
This also changed how we thought about the website.
Instead of treating it as another program site, CYS could become the central organizational hub - communicating overall impact, history, resources, donor information, strategic priorities, and the relationship between programs while creating clear pathways into individual services.
My Role
As Creative Director, I led brand discovery and strategic direction for the project, working directly with CYS leadership and our multidisciplinary creative team.
My role included:
Discovery + Strategic Framing
Led conversations designed to uncover audience needs, organizational priorities, existing brand equity, competitive context, and the tension between the parent organization and its program brands.
Brand Architecture
Helped reframe the project from “update the logo” into a larger question of how CYS should relate to multiple established identities without disrupting community recognition.
Creative Direction
Translated themes from discovery - including safety, hope, healing, support, and empowerment - into criteria for evaluating the visual identity and broader brand experience.
Digital Experience Strategy
Explored how the website could evolve from an outdated standalone presence into a centralized organizational hub connecting audiences to programs, impact, donor information, and resources.
Cross-Functional Alignment
Synthesized input from organizational leadership, internal stakeholders, and the creative team into a clearer strategic direction before design execution began.
The most important outcome of early discovery was a shift in the question being solved.
Before:
How do we redesign the CYS logo so it represents all of our programs?
After:
How do we build recognition for CYS as the trusted organization behind those programs - without erasing the identities communities already know?
The Shift
That distinction created a much stronger foundation for the identity and website work that followed.
Instead of asking one logo to explain everything CYS does, the brand could focus on communicating what connects everything CYS does.
A work In Progress
This case study documents an active brand transformation.
The project began with brand discovery and identity strategy and is expanding into a refreshed visual system and digital experience designed to strengthen CYS visibility, clarify its organizational role, and support future fundraising and community engagement.
More to come.