Creating an Identity for Early Motherloss

The idea of building a visual identity

for a community I’d rather not have the privilege to join, is an interesting task. Some context:

I first met the incredible women in the London sisterhood on a dark London evening at an Italian restaurant (if I remember correctly) on the Thames. It was a Christmas dinner, and luckily my curiosity to meet these other souls whose moms also died too soon was greater than my social anxiety. Just barely, though!

Like so many Londoners, I was a transplant – straight from Puerto Rico to continue my studies, and then onto an internship at an INGO. While there, I met an incredible soul, a woman who wrote a book about losing her mom. (The woman: Rachael Chadwick. The book: 60 Postcards. You’d love it). It was she who introduced me to the concept of being a woman in the world without her mom in the theoretical sense, beyond just my lived experience. She mentioned Hope Edelman’s pioneering work, “Motherless Daughters,” and I soon found myself googling “Motherless Daughters” and “London.” Phots’ meet-up group appeared in my search and the next thing I knew I was on tube, probably off at Blackfriars, and walking into dinner with a group of strangers.

We were all ages, all walks of life, and so many nationalities. One woman, from Spain, shared a name with my mom. Another girl my age, her story of losing not just her mom but so much of her family to cancer, just floored me. Another woman was now navigating mothering her own children, without her mom. We had lots of laughs about the social experience of being the person people feel bad for but don’t know what to do with, and lots of shared experience in how our dads navigated parenting through the death of a spouse.

For the first time, I was surrounded by women who just "got it." I've never been the same.

For the rest of my time in London, I met with this group of special women whenever I could.

The meetups weren’t elaborate, perhaps something creative here, meeting for tea there, but they were a lifeline for a 20-something going through life without her mom. I felt nurtured and loved for who I was. I felt I had a space to process and mourn not just the loss of my mom but the loss of everything that would have come with having her in my life as an adult, too.

I moved back stateside and eventually to France, and looked for other groups of motherless daughters, but I discovered that what I found in London was truly special. When Phots and I started talking about a website for the Sisterhood, one thing was clear – we want this to be a place where women can come and feel “home.”

On some of the design decisions

As I mentioned, being in a sisterhood like this isn’t our first choice. I’d rather have my mom! Like so much of what is beautiful in this world, we’re existing at the intersection of pain and the connection we found through it.

What sort of visual identity could do justice to such a vulnerability? We landed, I think, on something that is both gentle and striking, vulnerable and that also conveys our depth. So many grassroots organizations, without a design budget, must make-do with out-of-the-box websites, logos, and typefaces. Well that just wasn’t going to be good enough. We’re women who have been to hell and back trying to make a life for ourselves, to navigate this world in the face of one of the biggest losses a human can face in this life – that of their mother – and the accompanying trauma. We’re made of steel, but with tender hearts that know all-too-well the pain that comes with being alive in this world. For me, out-of-the-box wasn’t going to cut it.

On the typeface: Histeagin Serif

The font we’re using in our logo and for headings across the site was designed by Yahya Qara, a young type designer based in Morocco. What do I love about it? The better question is what DON’T I love about it.
–The most striking feature of the typeface is probably its ligatures – this community is about not going through the motherloss experience alone, and the sense of connection evoked with the connected letters, the smooshed together “O’s” – it was an immediate match.
– The weight is another interesting feature of Histeagin – there are moments, such as at the curves of the m, and generally at the upper edges of each letter, where it is much thinner. The letters get heavier towards the bottom, and I love the strength that conveys. The contrast between the thin delicate lines and the heavier sections carries the dichotomy of vulnerability and resilience that women like us experience.
– For the non-type-design aficionados reading this, the word “serif” refers to the small horizontal lines or triangular thickenings present on the edges of the letters. They typically bring a sense of seriousness and professionalism to a text. Some argue that it is easier for the eye to read, regardless, Phots especially has a lot of research to share on this site. The hope is that using Histeagin serif with its heavier weight and its serifs, provides the gravitas, while our

Body font, Lato,

can convey the information and stories we’re sharing here without getting in the way. Designed by Łukasz Dziedzic, it’s a Google font with open source values that we can get behind. It’s also pretty neat that its name, Lato, was an ancient city of Crete, a special nod to Phots’ and her mom’s Greek origins. Funnily enough, the word “lato” means “summer” in Polish, and Warsaw native Dziedzic wrote that the typeface was intended to be: “serious but friendly, with the feeling of summer.”

That’s us too. Early motherloss is serious and hard. The research on the topic, while scarce, is important. I’m really happy that we’re conveying this information through Lato. We’re using the lighter weight for visual balance with the heavier Histeagin, and for the breathing room and whitespace a lighter weight typeface provides.

Where did this come from? No pun intended, it happened quite organically. Phots was using the flower in her meetup materials, and when we got to talking about things, I shared that it was also my mom’s favorite flower! It is hopeful, it is resilient, it is beautiful and it is strong. Recently, I also learned that:

Sunflowers were successfully used to take up high concentration of radioactive isotopes and sequester them in stems and leaves following the wake of Chernobyl.

How perfect is that for us? Despite hardship, we’re still here! Our experiences provide strength and hope. A field of sunflowers, our Sisterhood helps us process the trauma of losing our mom and contributes to the overall wellbeing of our communities.

Our logo design was my first foray into identity building with the full-fledged AI tools we now have access to. I had originally started with a single simple line-drawing of a rose, in honor of Phots’ mom. Using Photoshop Beta’s “generative fill” tool, I played around with different variations of a sunflower and a rose together, in the minimal, serious, and yet beautiful style of continuous line drawings, which are also throughout the site. It was important to Phots that we have color, and life, in our visual identity. There were some gorgeous watercolor “splashes” that we tried as backgrounds, and ultimately I used AI to generate variations of our favorite to arrive at the one you see. I thought it was really cool that I edited the logo with Phots and Eli in real time, screensharing my illustrator file over zoom. We tweaked things here and there and came to something that we all loved!

I love that even though we’re a grassroots community organization, we don’t have to have yet another logo of stick figures holding hands. We’ve got something sophisticated and unique – something that hopefully evokes both resilience and hope.