Client Spotlight: APA
Industry: Nonprofit Organization
Client: American Psychological Association (APA)
About the Client: The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest professional association of psychologists in the United States.
Project: Design APA’s Effective Provider Logo and Training Manual
Project Details: In early 2012, APA’s Violence Prevention Office launched an initiative to assist mental health providers with the effective assessment and treatment of the psychological effects of violence against children. Epstein Creative was hired to design a logo to identify this targeted group of practitioners, known by APA as Effective Providers, and differentiate this group’s professional materials from other materials aimed at other facets of the psychological profession.
Using a soothing color palette to denote healing and safety, the logo included an arc to visually represent the unifying purpose of this group—to successfully help children overcome traumas associated with violence. The arc also resembled the curve of an umbrella to signify protection.
The next phase of this project was to design a training manual that Effective Providers could use to educate other professionals on how to positively facilitate a child’s recovery from violence. The primary element of the visual brand—the arc—became a unifying design element throughout the training manual to connect the various sections. Given the detailed nature of the text, Epstein Creative established a content hierarchy to organize the information and implemented various graphic elements to indicate modules, key objectives, activities, tools, and more. Headers, bullets, and lines were frequently used to break up large blocks of text into easy-to-train segments.
All of these strategic design and content management efforts combined to produce a user-friendly training manual that program facilitators could easily use to conduct successful workshops on this topic.