Nathan Fetherston Design
NEXUS4change
Social Media Brand
For over a year, I have been managing the social media accounts for NEXUS4change, a community and resource hub for academics in the field of Organizational Development and Change Management. The branding had to stand out in it's own niche academic category, both in its writing and its imagery. Much of the visual brand was based on work I had done for the Collaborative Change Library and All Things Change, both sub-brands that run under the NEXUS4change umbrella. Careful consideration was taken into developing a consistent voice and tone for the writing. Researching best practices and competitor profiles laid the foundation for the brand's strategy.
With a small, ambitious and close-knit team, the brand's visuals and strategies evolved as bandwidths shifted and content backlogs dried up. New ideas and altered priorities caused us to pivot, but never waver. Overall, this ongoing work represents an exercise in consistency and persistence. Many new lessons had to be learned, new tools had to be installed, new discussions had to be navigated, and new decisions had to be made. As we juggled these elements, the content couldn't stop, and the established rhythm had little room to change. Not to mention the small budget, which made me consider each of my designs in a more pragmatic light. Being good consistently and quickly was better that being perfect once. As I balanced the workload of multiple clients, NEXUS was a day-by-day, week-by-week job. That frequency taught me lessons about my practice that other projects simply couldn't.
Sub-brands
Icon and Logo Designs*
NEXUS developed a few sub-brands as a consequence of their methods of content creation. Webinars, filmed live on Zoom are uploaded under the name "All Things Change", a NEXUS-sponsored webinar show. There is also TOOLS4change, a 16-episode spinoff crash-course of some of the most talked-about methods in the field of change management. TOOLS has just finished, making room for a new spinoff brand to take its place in the very near future.
*NEXUS4change icon shown was made by me, though the full NEXUS4change logo was made by another designer. The NEXUS icon is used as a profile picture, and inherits its design elements from their original logo.
The Brand in Context
Screenshots are important to understand the context of some of the design solutions. Shown is a scroll of content meant to show as much of the brand as possible in a very short time frame. Feel free to pause the videos to appreciate the designs in their intended environment, or just watch them scroll by to get a sense of the brand at its broadest strokes.
Of course, you could just see it for yourself...
The Brand's Future
The brand's future relies on the growth of its audience outside of a tight niche of academics and businesspeople. Short-form video content is on the horizon for our content strategy, which opens up a new audience and avenues to engage with the old audience. Moving the writing away from a reliance on hashtags and towards keyword optimization could greatly impact SEO and our overall findability. Of course, some things have to stay the same - my job at NEXUS will continue to be a balancing act between graphic design, budget marketing and community-building.