Logo & website

mozambique school lunch initiative

2018

CLIENT

mozambique school lunchtime initiative

The Mozambique School Lunch Initiative is a small non-profit organisation and have been in operation for about 4.5 years.
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‍Their co-founder came to me in 2018 looking for a new look for the website as the company was seeking a new round of funding and wanted something that could look sharp to potential investors. Furthermore, to accompany the new website, they wanted a logo that would represent the organisation and what they do.
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Although school lunches aren’t unusual - even in developing countries - Mozambique School Lunch Initiative are approaching the problems facing these issues in a different way to improve the local economy. By investing in local farmers and providing seeds, equipment, tractor services etc for them, they're creating a larger surplus of crops which can then be bought, prepared by cooks and served in schools. This isn’t just a significant improvement to the local economy but also ensures lunches are still focused on key nutrition, making sure they get the calories, proteins & other critical vitamins/ minerals they need for physical & cognitive development.

creative approach

The first thing to do with this brief was to design the logo as it can help set the tone for the rest of the website look & feel.

The design of the logo had three core ideas; people, food & growth. These aspects of the design weren’t only meant literally, but also had a more symbolic meaning to the cause of the organisation. The red, green & yellow colours were the colours of the Mozambique flag and housed within each section was a core idea of the company.

In the red section you can see the silhouette of a person, in the green section a rice pattern to represent the food and in the yellow section symbolised growth and hope. I was really inspired by the fabrics used by the women in Mozambique so I was keen to have the pattern flow over the head of the silhouette to imitate a head wrap.

homepage

Generally, the website is very information and text heavy, so it was important to break these paragraphs up using imagery and short info cards to keep the information clear and concise. I also tried to group related photos in terms of colour too so the copy and images felt more connected.

styling

Given the nature of the project and how text heavy it is, I designed the site to be clean, sharp and as minimal as possible utilising white space as much as I can. I limited the palette to just three colours dark green, light green and a a cooler dark colour to add a bit more of an earthy tone.

I also used one of my favourite fonts - Manrope - as the primary font throughout the site due to it’s versatility, but the weight selection is also much simpler than other fonts.

the work

One of the most important pieces of information to convey was what MSLI do and how they’re helping, so breaking information apart into digestible information cards reduced concentration fatigue. Similarly, using graphs, charts, bulleted information and even shifting the position of the cards where necessary was good at breaking up monotony.

Imagery and photography of their work was crucial in providing context and painted a much clearer story of what MSLI were wanting to achieve. Specifically, images of the children, women and volunteers are the most powerful because investors are people and people connect with faces, thus generating better empathy and understanding.

the team

Arguably one of the most important parts of the website was the team section where we introduce the three main people behind the initiative. Again, this was a crucial part of the project given that the aim was to secure more funding from investors and knowing who you’re investing in is vital.

This page was one of the few areas where I utilised columns; the bios for each person were supplied by the client and as you can see, there are multiple lengths depending on the person. As there really wasn’t a “one size fits all” solution, I simply broke the copy up into columns.