Wally Krantz’s
Outside Order

American Red Cross

A ubiquitous icon elevated by a clear typographic hierarchy and system with a simple guide: the symbol is the hero, the type contextualizes it.

Designed by Wally in the mid-90s as a significant shift to their visual identity system, it continues to serve the American Red Cross 25 years later, giving agencies and creative teams a clean system for new messaging to serve those in need.

Coming across an American Red Cross Donor Center on a walk in Boston over twenty years later in 2019, Wally revisited the significance of this program:

Last night I was in Boston and went for a walk after dinner. I came across an American Red Cross building that has the signage as specified by the program I developed with Margaret Youngblood leading me at Landor San Francisco in the mid-90s. The program we made for was really an exercise in simplifying and decluttering a system that had gotten complicated over the years. We reduced the amount of signatures from 18 to 3 (massive symbol, medium symbol, small symbol), changed the typography from multiple weights of Clarendon to Akzidenz Grotesk, and made the shift from “Disaster Services” to “Disaster Relief”.

Funny thing is, last week in Des Moines, I saw a truck with the large symbol, and large Disaster Relief - something I never saw implemented. Now here is this. Two examples, in two weeks, looking brand new, that seemed to have taken the lead from the small guideline we gave them over 20 years ago. And I thought it looked great.

It was also on this project that I had to fly to Washington, D.C. to make a presentation in the American Red Cross National Headquarters. Margaret ended up not being able to make the meeting so I had to go by myself. This was my first solo presentation without one of my directors. It was at the American Red Cross headquarters across from the White House’s Ellipse on 17th Street NW. It was in the Board of Governor’s Hall - a giant room with massive Tiffany stained-glass windows behind me. I thought I would be presenting to four people. It ended up being 38. I sweated. I stammered. I didn’t project. I tripped over my words. It was terrible. I learned a lot. And in the end, they loved everything and thanked me for all the hard work and thinking we brought to them.

Tiffany Studios’ American Red Cross windows, installed in 1917 at the American Red Cross’ National Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Wally Krantz’s Outside Order is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Contact wk@outorinc.com

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