A New Brand Identity that Reflects LGBTQ Young People and Reinforces Our Life-Saving Mission

A brand refresh often occurs at an inflection point for an organization – whether driven by growth, external factors, or organizational shifts. As National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month comes to a close, The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) young people, is unveiling a new brand identity to better serve the LGBTQ young people who need our services the most. This is the first time in my tenure with The Trevor Project – 10 years as a volunteer counselor and four years as CEO and Executive Director – that our organization has seen a brand refresh of this magnitude.?

This pivotal chapter not only celebrates the evolution of The Trevor Project, but emphasizes the life-saving work that we’ve done and continue to do as we expand to serve the 1.8 million LGBTQ young people who seriously consider suicide each year in the U.S. Beyond our inviting new visuals – a modernized website, new logo, refreshed color palette, new imagery by LGBTQ artists, and more – this moment is more than just cosmetics. Our core demographic is LGBTQ young people ages 13-25, and this updated brand enables us to grow and evolve with the young people we serve.

We've had a whirlwind couple of years, with all of our key program areas making an immense impact for LGBTQ young people. Our brand refresh is a time to slow down and honor our roots – and reintroduce The Trevor Project as a brand that reflects a new generation of LGBTQ young people.

Alongside the launch of our new website, I shared my thoughts on what this brand refresh means for the future of The Trevor Project, and highlighted the inspiration behind all of our new updates, from design to functionality and more. You can read the full letter here, and take a look at an excerpt below.

Over the last 23 years, The Trevor Project has become the world’s leading organization responding to the crisis of LGBTQ youth suicide. We exist at the intersection of youth culture, the LGBTQ community, and mental health. As the world we live in evolves and changes, and as more people learn about the urgent need for our life-saving programs, our organization is also rapidly growing. It is at this moment that we have reached an inflection point and an opportunity to refresh The Trevor Project brand identity for the first time in over a decade.

To best understand how to achieve our mission, we partnered with LGBTQ youth, volunteers, and allies – buttressed by rigorous qualitative and quantitative insights – to inform the evolution of our identity.

I am excited to highlight the following updates to The Trevor Project’s brand identity:?

• We created new key website features and optimized flow to better support LGBTQ youth in crisis. These features include a persistent “Reach A Counselor” button on any given page and a “Quick Exit” feature so that anyone visiting our site can seamlessly move away from it if needed. Through our research and testing, we identified the need for quick access to our Crisis Services and a destination that feels safe and informative for young people in crisis. We also more clearly distinguish the areas where LGBTQ young people can go to get help and explore resources from sections of the website that allow the public to “Explore Trevor,” creating a better user experience when navigating pages and helping users get to desired destinations faster.
• The authentic voices and perspectives of the LGBTQ community will continue to be inextricably woven into the fabric of The Trevor Project brand. As an example, we worked with queer photographer, Devyn Galindo, who helped us document the LGBTQ youth community in an authentic and candid way to show real people doing real things on our website, social media, and resources. The vivid illustrations showcased throughout the site are the work of queer Guatemalan-Slovak artist Ludi Leiva, who integrated Trevor’s new color palette into her designs while remaining authentic to the brand’s identity and messaging.
• We evolved the familiar star in our logo to instill a message of hope. Now, the star alludes to a compass that helps LGBTQ youth navigate uncharted waters, intentionally pointing forward and upward.?

Read the full blog post here.