I joined Albatros Tech Cooperative Initiative in early 2020. With Albatros, we're trying to create a sustainable, democratic and fair working life aligned with our principles: Equality, horizontal hierarchy, collective functioning, consensus based decision making, fair revenue sharing, decentralization, cooperation and solidarity. All members of the cooperative are worker-owners. You can check our website here for more info about us!
As part of the collective, I take part in communication planning, graphic design and a little bit of web design. We did our launch on June 2020, and here are some of the designs I did so far for the cooperative.
Corporate Identity
As it we wanted to do our launch and start getting some jobs within the year, it was important to have an identity. But when I joined in February 2020, the initiative still didn't had a logo, but it was comissioned. We decided to wait on the logo design to build our colors and visual identity around the and in the end we loved what Gökhan Şahin delivered us! (which you can see at the top) We picked some colors from albatross bird of our logo, played around with some rgb values to come up with the optimum hues for the diverse and colorful designs we imagined! We picked off-tones of white and black to avoid being harsh on the eyes, and finally settled on Montserrat as our font to use in our designs. You can check these all in our small branding guide below!
Manifesto
We already had our manifesto in our website, even before our launch. But we wanted to make it a bit more interesting visually than a wall of text, so it can reach more people. To do that, I decided to seperate the whole text into pages made out of our brand colors. Worked well in the end it seems, with our manifesto reaching a lot more people than we anticipated.
"Our Principles"
We have defined 8 fundamental principles for our cooperative to stand on. To make our manifesto and principles, the most important things for us, a bit more colorful and interesting to read, I decided to illustrate them, with our worker-owners inside them. You can see the live result with some animations here on Our Maniteso page.
Illustrations
Group Illustration
We have a website, but what do we have there? Stock pictures of some laptops and codes! Eww.. Nah, kidding. Stock pictures are good, but can they replace some good old original illustrations? Don't think so! So changing the images on the website to something original was talked early on since I've joined and I was basically given a "you can do whatever you want, we trust you" card. I thought since it's our launch, why don't WE welcome the people into our website?
So after a week of taking everybody's screenshots in Zoom meetings, stalking their social media profile and trying to read what the joke about them will be, I collected enough material to come up with this illustration. It was really fun to see everybody's reaction when I presented this in our weekly meeting. Of course some people wanted to be a bit slimmer, some shirt designs changed, some faces were redrawn. But hey, we really love it in the end.
Umm.. why nobody has pants? Well, to tell the truth, COVID-19 was blasting outside when I meet my fellow cooperative owners. So I met them in an online meeting and all I got to see for the next six months was just their face and torso on Zoom. Yeah, so I don't know what they got downstairs. I'd like to imagine couple of them are actually centaurs and at least one of them has spider legs.
So after a week of taking everybody's screenshots in Zoom meetings, stalking their social media profile and trying to read what the joke about them will be, I collected enough material to come up with this illustration. It was really fun to see everybody's reaction when I presented this in our weekly meeting. Of course some people wanted to be a bit slimmer, some shirt designs changed, some faces were redrawn. But hey, we really love it in the end.
Umm.. why nobody has pants? Well, to tell the truth, COVID-19 was blasting outside when I meet my fellow cooperative owners. So I met them in an online meeting and all I got to see for the next six months was just their face and torso on Zoom. Yeah, so I don't know what they got downstairs. I'd like to imagine couple of them are actually centaurs and at least one of them has spider legs.
Our Team
I was still a newcomer when I did the group illustration, maybe 2 or 3 months in after I joined the coop. A lot happened after that, and I got to chance spend much, much more time as a part of the team. We even went camping together (turns out, they all do have human legs!) So at the end of 2020, when when we finally had enough time to make "Our Team" page, it was much easier to come up with illustrations to reflect each one's personality, or add small details here and there and reference to our inside jokes. Oh, and veryone wrote a paragraph to talk about themselves, which made it even easier for me. Check out our page to get to know our lovely team a little bit!
Manifesto Page
Manifesto is basically what we stand on, and it is important to us that people got our message. So I designed the manifesto page to tell our story in chapters and what kind of future we want for ourselves. I've used Illustrator, CSS animations and Divi Builder to design the page.
Footer
After putting the group illustration to our homepage, we decided add couple more illustrations more, so I did these for "Join Our Team", "Subscribe to Our Newsletter" and "Tell Us About Your Project" forms.
"From Us"
We've got a lot to share. So creating a "From Us" part in our website was something that we talked for a long time. In this page, you'll find Blog, Podcast and In Press sections and lots of content of blogposts, Albatros Diaries talking about the journey of our coop, podcasts, interviews and recordings.
Radioalbatros
As I said above, we love talking. Our meetings are forever. So just like every group which has more than two 30+ guys, it was inevitable that we were going to end up having a podcast. We decided it was a good medium to introduce ourselves, so we recorded our first episode as the whole group and plan to keep doing more episodes where we interviewed each other! Here's the cover art of our first episode, and I'm planning to keep the style with our individual illustrastions.
So the journey of our cooperative initiative has just begun. I'm really happy with how our visuals turned out to be, and it's really evolving into a style that I'd be saying "Man, I love what these people are doing" couple years ago if I'd seen this. I'll be updating here regularly, and you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and be sure to check our website as well!
