Penny Lane Centers | Branding & UX Design

Penny Lane Centers has been providing services for families and underserved communities in Los Angeles County since 1969. Their branding hadn't changed much in over 30 years while their services and mission grew. It now needed to reflect the work they do and needed to feel fresh and current.

Their website was the main point of pain for their clients and service providers. Instead of being a user-friendly hub for easy access to their organization's 30+ programs and services, it turned out to be a complex and confusing labyrinth of menus without clear direction for their users.

The Penny Lane executive team felt that the voices of every team member were important, so we opened the discovery process up to the entire workforce. I used worksheets I had developed over the years to conduct meetings, explain processes, and distribute branding exercises. Then, I collected and analyzed all the data to define Penny Lane Centers for everyone who worked in the organization, not just those at the top. 

From this research, I was able to gain a clear direction on where to steer the brand and to begin to define the needs of the site.

​​​​​​​Turning that data into three clear visual directions, I created mood boards that allowed me to align the team's ideas about the brand with my suggestions for a new aesthetic. With sign-off on the "Happiness" direction, I was able to move forward into some traditional design work.

The first item on our list was a redesign of the Penny Lane logo. Through traditional iteration and deduction, we arrived on a logo that tells the story of a family (or two people supporting a third) with a heart at the center, reflecting the soul of the work Penny Lane does.

Penny Lane Centers had various programs adopting individual logos. We established a unified logo system to bring all programs under the Penny Lane name, emphasizing their unity as a family.

Now, I was able to create a complete design system based on the compiled research, feedback, and mood boards. Collaborating with a copywriter, I delivered a style guide that equipped Penny Lane with the resources to not only implement their fresh aesthetic but also to articulate their brand through tone and messaging. 

Building off the research and designs from the rebranding, I took Penny Lane Centers through a UX process to redesign their website. The UX project can be viewed here: https://www.sfoggdesign.com/portfolio/penny-lane-centers