Small Wins: Strategic Sub-Brand Design

 

Some design briefs are straightforward. You need a logo. You need it to look good. You need it to fit the brand. You need it yesterday.

But the briefs I love most are the ones with a little more heart. The ones where the visual identity has to do more than sit nicely on a page. It has to capture a feeling, support a purpose, and give a small idea enough personality to feel real.

That was the challenge behind the Small Wins Club logo.

Small Wins Club is an internal employee engagement initiative for My Diabetes Tutor. It lives as an all-employee Slack channel where the team can share quick moments, small victories, and low-pressure weekly challenges designed to take just a minute or two to join.

Not every culture-building effort needs to be a major event, a formal meeting, or a big company-wide campaign. Sometimes it’s a quick prompt. A shared recipe. A small check-in. A reason to pause in the middle of a busy week and remember there are actual humans behind the work.

My task was to create a logo for the program that felt warm, energetic, and approachable. It needed to belong to the My Diabetes Tutor brand without feeling like a copy-and-paste extension of the main identity. And it needed to convey the idea that small victories deserve to be celebrated in a big way.

The My Diabetes Tutor brand already has a strong visual foundation, including an icon built around three interlocking rings. Those rings suggest connection, support, continuity, and movement, which made them a natural starting point. I didn’t want to abandon that equity. I wanted to reinterpret it.

 

 

That’s one of my favorite parts of sub-branding: finding the thread that connects the new idea to the existing brand, then pulling it in a slightly different direction.

Too close, and the sub-brand feels unnecessary. Too far, and it feels disconnected. The sweet spot is where it still clearly belongs, but has enough personality to stand on its own.

For the Small Wins Club, I reworked the interlocking-ring concept into a more celebratory mark that subtly nods to the Olympic rings. That visual direction clicked because it created the exact tension the program is built around.

The Olympics represent the pinnacle of achievement: huge goals, massive effort, public celebration, gold-medal moments. Small Wins Club is about the opposite end of that spectrum. It is about the tiny steps. The ordinary wins. The moments that might not look impressive from the outside but still matter. Trying something new. Participating when you’re busy. Sharing a small piece of your life with your team. Taking one minute to connect instead of staying buried in the day.

The logo uses the visual language of big achievement to celebrate small progress, because small progress is what makes big achievement possible.

That was the idea I wanted the mark to carry at a glance.

 

 

Visually, I stayed rooted in the My Diabetes Tutor color palette, using the familiar navy and bright blue to maintain brand continuity. But I pushed the personality a little further. The mark is rounder, bolder, and more playful. The composition has more movement. The typography feels confident but friendly. It still belongs to the larger brand family, but it has a lighter, more celebratory energy.

That distinction matters.

Internal initiatives often get treated like afterthoughts, but they are still brand experiences. They convey something about the culture to employees.

Thoughtful branding does not always mean making something elaborate. Sometimes it means making something simple that knows exactly what it is trying to say.

For this project, the message was clear: Small things count. Small wins deserve to be celebrated. The final logo connects the program to the parent brand, gives it its own personality, and turns a simple Slack channel into something a little more memorable and meaningful.

That’s the kind of branding work I care about. Not just making something look polished, but making something feel right.