Girl Scouting and Girl Guides rebranded in the UK in 2019. Now the Girl Scouts of the USA has implemented its brand refresh. Back in 2019, Collins began working with the Girl Scouts. The now 100-plus-year-old organization has long been part of women’s and civil rights movements, and the design team was tasked to create a renewed brand that showed that the organization was still a “hopeful cultural force” that would remain relevant in the lives of young women into the future.
Girl Scouts in the States have had very few logo updates in its history. A trefoil design with an eagle inside was used from 1912 to 1978, when Saul Bass created his innovative profiles logo. That mark was updated in 2010 by The Original Champions of Design with more diverse profile face shapes and hairstyles. The new logo design is highly simplified—just the trefoil shape in Girl Scout green.
Collins’ new system also includes a greatly widened color palette, a bespoke typeface, updated merchandise and clothing, and a powerful poster series, some of which were created by former Girl Scouts and contemporary design professionals such as Debbie Millman, Laurie Haycock Makela, Jessica Hische, Jennifer Sterling, Noreen Morioka, and Cheryl Miller.
Girl Scouts of the USA has dozens of councils across the country that also needed marketing, recruitment, and communications support. From the Collins’ website: There were “dozens of energetic councils designing communications for the same brand. The councils needed tools that would provide coherence across the country and offer flexibility to support their different communities. We were inspired by the visuality and history of Girl Scout patches and badges. These are artifacts of achievement that girls proudly wear to tell their own story: their goals, their accomplishments, their interests, their identities. We translated these objects into bold, geometric forms that could be used as building blocks for design and interactivity. The system grants a common language to all communications and is flexible enough to support any application, whether it [is] a presentation template or a vibrant campaign.”