Meet The New Boston Speaks Up Logo: We celebrate diversity, and demand better access to opportunities for underrepresented people.
We interrupt our steady drumbeat of podcast releases to share our new Boston Speaks Up brand. Our new logo below intends to emphasize Boston’s diversity and openness to change, which in light of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, we need to embrace now more than ever.
If you’ve followed Boston Speaks Up the past two years, you’re familiar with our focus on addressing inequality and sparking social change. We are celebrating Boston’s diversity, and demanding better access to opportunities for underrepresented people.
We’ve profiled leaders such as David Delmar Senties of Resilient Coders and Roman Jaquez of Tech4Hood — founders leading efforts to teach people of color valuable coding skills. We’ve profiled immigrant founders such as Wafaa Arbash of WorkAround, Clement Cazalot of TechStars, Christian Magel of Venture Lane and Timi Kayo-Dayode of Worksense. We’ve profiled Boston’s next generation of African-American social impact entrepreneurs — SYRG CEO Rahkeem Morris, OpportuniMe founder Miracle Olatunji, Fresh Truck Founder Josh Trautwein, and Dearborn STEM Academy’s Mardi Fuller. And we’ve profiled some of Boston’s international-born writers — Lucy Maffei of BostInno (now Boston Business Journal) from Tuscany, Italy; and BostInno Editor Srividya Kalyanaraman from Mumbai, India.
Today is June 1, which also marks the beginning of Pride Month. There couldn’t be more fitting alignment between Boston Pride and Boston Speaks Up. We each share the vision of facilitating change and progress in society by embracing our community’s diverse history, culture, and identities. (Note: while COVID-19 has eliminated our ability to be out in the streets together for Boston Pride this June, the event has gone digital: https://www.bostonpride.org/.)
This logo concept came to fruition naturally independent of another interesting fact we later discovered: Boston’s Zakim Bridge is wired with some of the most advanced bridge lighting in the world. (Fun fact: the Zakim’s LED lighting solution is from Burlington-based Philips Color Kinetics, which uses high-bandwidth, bi-directional, Ethernet speed data transmission to enable the full range of dynamic, color-changing effects.)
Further, the bridge can actually take on all the colors represented in our logo, which was on full display for the Zakim’s 15th anniversary lighting show in 2018.
We love the deeper meaning the logo has now taken on. As has been reported over the years, the Zakim will often display colors to pay respects to those in pain. For example, in 2016, the Zakim Bridge was lit up in black, yellow and red to show support for Belgium in the aftermath of a terror attack that claimed more than 30 lives and injured dozens of others in Brussels: Zakim bridge displays Belgian colors in solidarity.
Before we sign off, we’d like to thank everyone for supporting the growth of Boston Speaks Up these first two years. We are so grateful to listeners as well as everyone who took the time to email us guest suggestions or simply send us messages of support. Your words of encouragement mean the world to us.
A very special thanks to our partners Matt Lowe and TJ Hom from Sum of all Particles who we developed the brand with. Matt and TJ’s Particle Creative nailed the final logo design with the concept of utilizing the iconic Zakim Bridge in the background, complete with a diverse mix of colors.
We’d also like to give a special shout out to the folks at Silicon Valley Bank and New England Venture Capital Association for embracing our storytelling initiative. We have some exciting new productions we’ll be announcing later this year that will give an even stronger indication of where our budding partnership is heading.
Last, if you have podcast guest suggestions, please send them our way. We’re keen to speak to diverse leaders who are positively shaping Boston’s and the world’s future.
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
-Zach Servideo, founder/host of Boston Speaks Up
