Using Y2K aesthetics Mojo Supermarket gives Girls Who Code a perfectly pixelated brand refresh

To mark their ten year anniversary, Girls Who Code (GWC) has partnered with Mojo Supermarket to refresh their brand. A nonprofit organisation, for the past decade GWC has been spearheading a movement to get more young women, girls and non-binary individuals into coding and tech fields, an area long dominated by men. And so, they sought an identity that would “help girls program their imagination into reality by showing them that they can apply creative coding to everything around them – to codify life”, a press release explains.

To catch the interest of a new generation of coders, the rebrand looks back to the Y2K aesthetics of when GWC first began, using pixels as its core graphic language. “We are all witnessing the renaissance of the early internet days look, and Gen Z is the main driving force behind it,” says Camilo de Galorefore, director of art and design at Mojo Supermarket. “So we wanted to utilise the nostalgia of the popular Y2K aesthetics by focusing on the pixels as the main graphic element in our new design language. Pixels are the basic unit of programmable colour on a computer display. You can make any digital image from it, so we wanted to show that with code, you can make absolutely anything.” Throughout the rebrand pixels form a ten, representing the anniversary, while also forming other illustrative elements, like smiley faces, hearts and cursors.

The refresh also sees Mojo Supermarket apply a new colour palette, with bright hues of pastel purple, pink and orange being the focus. Alongside the new palette, photography assets are highlighted – to champion the people who have used Girls Who Code – with subtle light reflections, giving what a press release describes as “the well-deserved main character energy by placing them at the forefront of the images”.

This isn’t the first collaboration between GWC and Mojo Supermarket. Last year saw a collaboration which turned Doja Cat’s Woman into the world’s first codeable music video, and more recently, the collaborators launched Girls Who Code Girls, an interactive experience that empowers girls to create personalised video game characters using code.