Elephant borrows cues from code on new identity for All Star Code

The latest work from creative company, Elephant, is an identity and website to help “advance the mission” of All Star Code, an organisation empowering young men of colour to acquire financial independence and social mobility through the power of code. The collaboration also includes work from Elephant on All Star Code’s new platform, Hello World.

Drawing from signatures associated with coding, Elephant leaned into typically back-end components like Javascript and primary colours, immersing themselves in the likes of Python and C++ to find visual elements and integrate them into an “emotionally charged art direction,” says Carlos Matias, VP of brand design. The company then “elevated” these elements with editorial photography in a bid to appeal to younger audiences. The new site features uplifting stories from All Star Code students discussing their successes to inspire users to register, join or donate.

To accomplish the identity, Elephant faced “three distinctive, yet connected challenges,” Greg Assemat Tessandier, Elephant president, tells It’s Nice That. These included: “Bringing to life the mission and values of All Star Code in the most genuine and transparent way; digging into coding culture to extract its most universal visual representation allowing us to communicate ‘code,’ without showing code.” The last challenge was integrating student stories with the core visual system – which Greg says they achieved “by finding the right balance in the right context.”

The idea for Hello World, All Star Code’s newly-launched platform, came from Hello World programmes which, traditionally, are the first programmes new coders learn to illustrate how coding works and to test that a system or language is operating correctly. “Given this historical context,” says Elephant’s statement, “the tagline serves as a confident reintroduction into a world created by the student.”

Elephant began its pro bono partnership with All Star Code over a year ago as part of its Commitment to Change: “All Star Code is an amazing organisation that champions code as a means for change and progress,” says Eric Moore, CEO of Elephant. “Without people of colour at the coding table, inequality continues to perpetuate.”