Girl Scouts of the USA / Champions Design

The Girl Scouts of the USA is the nation’s preeminent organization dedicated solely to girls. More than 2.5 million strong and over 100 years old, GSUSA builds girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place. They also sell great cookies.

In 2010, the Girl Scouts revised their programming and advertising to better engage girls today. To support this shift, they approached Champions to reassess their identity.

The original pointed trefoil was never fully abandoned by GSUSA; it co-existed with the softened trefoil profile logo created by Saul Bass in 1978. For consistency, we needed to create one iconic shape that worked across the whole system and, for meaning, we needed to infuse youth and power into the profiles.

For a new identity system to effectively take hold, it had to live and die by just a few rules held closely. The rules had to inspire creativity and thereby harmonize hundreds of unique voices.

Now fully consolidated to one iconic trefoil shape, GSUSA can leverage the solid trefoil as an ownable secondary design element. It inspires limitless expression, from patterns and textures to abstract compositions and meaningful visual metaphors. The advantage of the solid trefoil is that it creates recognizable consistency without monotonous repetition.

Critical to brand success was building tools that would educate, inspire and empower all 2.5 million potential brand ambassadors, thus the brand cheat sheet was born.

Girl Scouts of the USA

Empowering a new generation of girls.