The Girl Scouts of the USA has always had well-known visual signifiers, like pig-tailed little girls selling TagAlongs outside supermarkets, circular patches sewn onto brown sashes, and summer sun-faded friendship bracelets tied to small wrists. Since their 1912 inception in Savannah, Georgia, these images have ingratiated Girl Scouts into our culture, and underlined their mission to pioneer female leadership and encourage girls to act on their dreams.
Over 100 years later, Girl Scouts still plays a key role in the lives of over a million American Girls, and now they have a new brand identity that reflects this importance. COLLINS recently took elements of these iconic Girl Scouts images to develop a colorful brand system, Trefoil logo, and refreshed site design for the organization.
COLLINS was particularly inspired by the visual history of Girl Scouts patches and badges, and translated them into geometric forms to use as building blocks throughout the brand system. The reimagined Trefoil logo sits at the center of this visual language, paying homage to its previous iterations while distilling them down to a new shape and color.
The Girl Scouts of America is composed of 112 independent councils, so COLLINS’s creation needed to arm each one with the tools for cohesive communications while still providing flexibility to support their different communities. The patch-inspired shapes met these needs head-on to serve as a common language to all communications, while retaining an adaptability for any application, from presentation templates to campaigns.
COLLINS and Girl Scouts also teamed up with Positype to design a custom typeface worthy of the new brand system, opting for a playful, yet classy serif that deftly compliments the color palette and iconography. The project also extended into considerations for new Girl Scouts merchandise, which took the form of reviving styles from the archives with modern updates.
If this comprehensive undertaking wasn’t enough, COLLINS also worked with a diverse group of women designers to create a series of posters called The Trefoil Poster Series, with each poster expressing the artist’s unique experience of Girl Scouts. Ranging from emerging voices to celebrated masters—including PRINT’s very own Debbie Millman—the posters reflect a spectrum of styles and interpretations of the Trefoil emblem.
