A visual system for the IRC in Utah's first fundraiser in six years

With a play on Utah’s tourism slogan ‘Life Elevated,’ the International Rescue Committee in Utah turned the phrase around and asked who’s actually doing the elevating.

Their response became the title of their first fundraising dinner in six years: Rebuilding Lives, Elevating Futures: An Evening with the IRC in Utah. On May 21, roughly 225 supporters, sponsors, civic leaders, and program participants gathered at This Is The Place Heritage Park with a $100,000 fundraising target. But their greater ambition was to raise the profile of the local work, rally Utah’s networks behind it, and remind every guest in the room that the families being supported are part of the community.

The IRC in Utah has been doing the work since 1994. Case management for newly arrived families. Immigration legal services. Employment support. Youth programs. The unglamorous, ongoing project of helping someone build a life from scratch in a new place. This dinner was the year they decided to celebrate their work and call attention to the work still ahead.

The IRC team came to us to design the full visual system that would carry the night — from the event mark to the printed program to the takeaway each guest would carry home.

Finding a balanced tone between celebration and urgency

The challenge was tonal more than visual. The evening had to feel celebratory and urgent at the same time. Warm enough to honor the people in the room, but sharp enough to make clear that the work itself is harder, and more needed, than it has been in years.

We anchored the system in four strategic moves:

Reclaimed the title: Rebuilding Lives, Elevating Futures is a deliberate play on Utah’s “Life Elevated” tourism campaign. That reclamation drove the visual system, repositioning a familiar Utah phrase to honor the people doing the most elevating, and grounding every design choice in that act of redirection.

Carried the arrow forward: The IRC’s strong global brand system is centered on the upward arrow. We carried that arrow forward as the system’s anchor — placed inside a yellow lockup that appears across every surface — so the event reads clearly as IRC and clearly this evening. Continuity with the global brand but with a distinct emotional tone for one local night.

Pushed past “cozy fundraiser”: The brief pointed toward inviting and family-friendly cues with kraft tones, soft line art, and warmer textures. We took these familiar fundraiser references as inputs, then made a deliberate move past them. The moment facing refugee families today is harder than it has been in years. The system needed to honor that. We landed on a high-contrast palette and bold editorial typography to signal that this evening is a celebration in a room of neighbors taking the work seriously.

Designed for three audiences in one room: The 225 guests fell into three groups with different relationships to the work: longtime supporters, prospective sponsors and civic leaders, and the clients and program participants whose lives the IRC supports daily. Every design surface needed to feel right to all three at once: celebratory to the first, credible to the second, and dignifying to the third.

One visual system for every surface

The system was built to flex. Across a 24x36″ pillar at the entrance and a 3x4″ sticker in a goodie bag. Across a digital email banner and a printed welcome itinerary handed out at the door. Across seven different numbered table cards and a half-dozen bi-fold sponsor recognitions. That breadth required a fixed visual vocabulary that could rearrange itself for any format.

The mark

The event mark is built around the IRC’s existing arrow, recontextualized inside a yellow square lockup that becomes the system’s anchor. The arrow’s diagonal upward angle does literal work for “Elevating Futures,” but the bigger move is what it signals to the IRC’s audience: this evening belongs to the same family of work that’s been ongoing since 1994.

Palette

Black, yellow, white. The IRC’s signature yellow as the only color doing the bulk of the work. The restraint is the point. High contrast reads as confidence, refuses to settle into the visual comfort zone of typical fundraisers, and gives every surface the same uncompromised treatment.

Typography

A bold condensed display sans carries every headline. The type does as much narrative work as the imagery — urgent, modern, editorial, and willing to take up the page while the body copy stays quiet underneath. The headlines do the shouting so the rest of the system doesn’t have to.

Texture and imagery

The visual library is anchored in topographic line work. Utah’s terrain is rendered as abstract contour, suggesting elevation, path, and journey without referencing any one place. A single mountain illustration is the system’s most representational moment; everything else abstracts the same idea into pure pattern.

A plus-grid motif runs alongside the topography, doing double duty as a graphic texture and a quiet visual nod to the intersections, gatherings, and care this work runs on. The black background carries a subtle paper grain honoring the brief’s request for “warmer materials” in texture, even as the palette pushes elsewhere.

The system, not the symbols

Every piece across the system uses the same vocabulary: yellow arrow mark, topographic panel, plus-grid, display typography, the same proportions of yellow against black. The pieces reconfigure to fit the format. The 24x36″ pillar arranges them at scale; the 3x4″ sticker condenses them into a sponsor thank-you; the welcome itinerary stacks them vertically for a guest’s hand. That repetition across surfaces is what turns the work from a logo into an experience.

Print system

The welcome itinerary hands every guest the night’s arc — a welcome letter on one side, the evening’s schedule on the other. Table sponsor cards are bi-fold and double-printed so they read clearly from across a round table. The pillar signage holds the system at its largest scale. Sponsor stickers travel home in guests’ pockets as small thank-yous. Each piece was designed as part of the same family, not as a one-off.

Digital system

Event website and Pardot email banners, sponsor recognition graphics, awardee recognition graphics, and a final at-event sponsor slide. For the surfaces the IRC in Utah team needed to maintain locally — particularly sponsor graphics that update as new partners come on board — we built editable templates in Canva so the office can keep moving without coming back to us for every change.

Going beyond dollars raised

The dollars raised and stories told at Rebuilding Lives, Elevating Futures are the night’s most visible measures of success, but the deeper measure is the one that’s harder to count: how many more people in Utah leave the room understanding what the IRC does and choosing to back it.

Working with the IRC has been some of the most meaningful work. The kind of project where craft, restraint, and judgment translate directly into dollars raised and lives changed.