New York based client, "Seeds of Peace", is a non-profit organisation that hosts 'camps' bringing together youth from warring communities (e.g.: Israeli & Palestinians) and teaching them mediation, negotiation, tolerance and other 'peace building' skills over the course of a summer season.

In 2014, to mark its 20th anniversary, it is launching a new annual event which aims to re-convene its past graduates (referred to as "Seeds"), many of whom now occupy positions of power and influence in their respective countries/communities, with the aim of determining whether the principles taught to them at the Seeds of Peace camp can now be put into practice. It is an informal event, described as part conference, part networking and part brain storming.

The first part of our brief was to generate a name for this event as the clients did not wish to refer to it as a Seeds of Peace Conference and aimed instead to give it its own independent identity. The second part was to develop the new entity's logo.

Whist we recognised that the new brand needed to stand-alone from Seeds of Peace, we believed that for the purposes of capitalising on the existing SoP brand equity, it should make some reference to it, enabling the team behind this ‘startup’ to use the SoP longstanding credibility whenever it would help to advance their efforts. Given that this was an event aiming to bring together past Seeds, we determined that GATHER (the opposite of scatter) would be appropriate for naming purposes. It also had the necessary tonal connotations, avoiding the need to label the event as a formal summit or conference.

For the logo: we aimed to develop a mark that would be solid, confident and clever. The name - GATHER - is in itself soft and sentimental and so we believed that the visual identity should, in its boldness, counter this to some extent in order to establish gravitas and escalate impact.

We determined that the best creative solution to the brief would be a typographic one, not resorting to the use of a separate visual icon to support or, more importantly detract attention from, the word GATHER. The end result was a logo symbolising the coming together of people from east and west, a global movement of individuals coming together to meet in the middle ground. The fact that they have this singular, shared destination transforms them from individuals into a collective / community. The "dots" making up the letters are, in fact, shaped like seeds.

Launching end of April 2014, we have not yet had the opportunity to measure any results for this logo.