case study: Center for Asian American Media
cause arts & culture
organization Center for Asian American Media
website www.caamedia.org
highlights
- Praise and recognition from San Jose Museum of Art, The San Francisco Asian Art Museum, and The National Endowment of the Arts.
Asian American Film Festival
Nuance and complexity are good qualities for the filmmakers and artists that the Center for Asian American Media supports, but not for branding the organization itself.
CAAM came to for help creating a single identity that united its many program areas, especially its annual film festival, which had been operating almost as an independent organization. It wanted to use the re-brand as an opportunity to attract younger audiences, but not alienate its longtime supporters in the process.
Composed of overlapping circles, the resulting logo lends itself to multiple interpretations. It suggests metaphors of vision, calling to mind a lens flare, or perhaps the components of the human eye. The circles could be interpreted as a Venn diagram representing the many Asian American communities, or alternatively, the many mediums of storytelling. It is at once referential and vague, big enough to capture the ever-shifting identity of an arts organization, but distinctive enough to create a powerfully self-confident identity.
The 29th Annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) offered an ideal stage to unveil the new identity. Past festival campaigns had been design-heavy, and CAAM wanted to tell more of a visual story. CAAM’s new tagline, Stories to Light, became the inspiration for the entire festival campaign. The trailer Underground created for the festival was a true community effort. Everyone who appears in the trailer is a friend of CAAM, Underground, or Kontent, our film production house. This makes watching the final product a who’s who moment for San Francisco residents and local CAAM members – a uniquely effective community engagement strategy.