Lions Clubs Brand Guidelines: A Chicago Meeting, a Gold L and “We Serve”

Clubs that already existed, and a secretary who gathered them.

Lions histories date the association to 1917 and to Chicago, and call Melvin Jones its founder, but the story has more than one starting point. English Wikipedia says Jones, a 38-year-old Chicago insurance man and secretary of a local group called the Business Circle, argued that business clubs should look beyond business to their communities. He contacted similar groups around the United States, and an organisational meeting took place in Chicago on June 7, 1917.

Lions clubs were already in existence. Club histories published by Lions members say one of the invited groups was an Association of Lions Clubs based in Evansville, Indiana, led by Dr. W. P. Woods, with some clubs organised in 1916; a 2022 history in the Connecticut paper the Bee-Intelligencer gives 1916 as the founding year. The Business Circle joined that name rather than the reverse. A national convention in Dallas that October, with 36 delegates from 22 clubs and nine states by one Lions club’s account, adopted a constitution, by-laws, a code of ethics and an emblem, and set “unselfish service to others” as a main tenet. It elected Woods as the first president and Jones as secretary-treasurer. Jones later gave up his insurance agency to work full-time at headquarters, English Wikipedia says.

The association became international on March 12, 1920, when a club opened in Windsor, Ontario. Its formal name remains the International Association of Lions Clubs, the Lions Club of Honolulu notes, and “Lions Clubs International” and “Lions International” are used in public.

It is a membership association, based in Oak Brook, Illinois. English Wikipedia gave more than 46,000 clubs and over 1.4 million members in more than 200 geographic areas in January 2020. Clubs carry out local work, while the Lions Clubs International Foundation makes grants for larger projects. A youth wing, the Leo clubs, grew from a club founded in 1957 by Jim Graver, a Lion and baseball coach at Abington High School in Pennsylvania, using the school’s maroon and gold; it became a Lions programme in 1964.

An L, two profiles and two colours.

The name was the main point of contention in 1917, according to a history published by the Beaufort, North Carolina, Lions Club. Jones researched the idea of “Lions,” it says, and the name won on a secret ballot. A 1931 issue of The Lion magazine, quoted on the same page, listed courage, strength, activity and fidelity as the qualities behind the choice.

The emblem’s construction is plain. Lions club histories describe a gold letter L on a circular field, bordered by a ring with two lion profiles facing away from each other. The Lions Club of Honolulu says the profiles look in both directions for chances to serve, with “Lions” at the top of the circle and “International” at the bottom. English Wikipedia places the adoption of an emblem at Dallas in 1917, while club histories tie it to the 1919 convention; the Beaufort club’s account says that at that convention there was a move to change the symbol, and the Denver attorney Halsted Ritter answered it with a reading of the letters as “Liberty, Intelligence, Our Nation’s Safety.” English Wikipedia’s biography of Ritter also credits him with that phrase at the 1919 convention, in Chicago.

Purple and gold are the traditional colours, approved at the Dallas convention according to one Lions club’s history. The Honolulu club says purple stands for loyalty and gold for sincerity of purpose. Flags of the World, the flag reference, says the association has used a standard flag since the 1920s, showing the logo on purple, sometimes blue-violet or dark blue, or on gold, and that clubs mostly use small vertical bannerets carrying the logo, the club’s name and a local feature such as a landmark. Convention-goers also trade pins and other souvenirs, English Wikipedia notes.

A marketing site for Lions in eastern Connecticut summarises the organisation’s brand guidelines as naming a primary palette of blue, yellow and purple, with Helvetica for print and Roboto for web and digital use. The motto is “We Serve.”

Banners, pins and field photographs.

A campaigning group has to be recognised in places a company rarely goes: on a banner at a protest, on the side of a boat, on a lapel, on the cover of a report about something grim. That pressure shapes how these organisations present themselves, and the published guidelines of two of them show how it is handled.

Greenpeace’s visual identity guidelines say its yellow campaign banners have been used in non-violent direct actions for more than 40 years, and they build a colour rule around them. Its display type, Zodiac Sans, was drawn from the shape of inflatable boats, according to the studio that made it. Ships are a medium in their own right: the guidelines keep the rainbow for Greenpeace vessels. Even the logo began, by the group’s own account, as a felt-tip word on a beer mat.

Amnesty International offers the matching case at a smaller scale. Its candle in barbed wire, which Wikipedia says was first drawn for a Christmas card, appears on a pin badge the group sells, and its 2015 toolkit sets a minimum height for the wordmark. The same toolkit asks for yellow to be used sparingly and keeps the logo out of cover photos on social media. The Nobel Prize’s record notes that the group’s findings are published in special reports, so the report cover is one of its everyday surfaces.

Field photography has rules of its own. Amnesty’s toolkit says images should never be sensationalist and should show people as individuals with their own stories, with the date, names and location in the caption. Greenpeace’s guidelines, for their part, cite a single picture from the whaling campaigns, a small inflatable between the harpoon and the whale, as an image that tells its story on sight.

Sight work, and who could belong.

The cause it is known for came from a single speech. On June 30, 1925, Helen Keller addressed the convention at Cedar Point, Ohio, and charged Lions to be “Knights of the Blind,” English Wikipedia says. Sight work has run through the organisation since: Lions World Sight Day was launched in 1998, and the foundation’s SightFirst programme funds eye care, including work on trachoma. In 1945 the association was among the non-governmental organisations invited to assist with the drafting of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco, where Jones served as a consultant.

Local work varies widely. English Wikipedia cites a United Kingdom and Ireland scheme, Message in a Bottle, which places a bottle with medical details in the refrigerators of vulnerable people, and hearing screening in Perth, Western Australia. Partisan politics and sectarian religion are barred from club discussion, it says.

Membership has been restricted. The Bee-Intelligencer history of 2022 says membership was open at first only to white men, that Black men were allowed into a limited number of clubs by the early 1960s, and that Austin, Texas, claims the first all-African American Lions club, in August 1967.

Women were admitted later. Ladies’ auxiliaries existed by 1924 under all-male national leadership. Delegates voted down full membership in 1986, the Bee-Intelligencer says, then approved it at the 1987 convention in Taipei, after the Supreme Court’s decision against Rotary that May. Membership remains by invitation, with a sponsor and the approval of a club’s board.

For a design guide, Lions Clubs shows how a badge built from one letter, a ring and two profiles can be read back into words by its own members. Compare Rotary, the Chicago service club founded twelve years earlier, and Girl Scouts, another American membership organisation. For this guide we use a deep purple and an old gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lions Clubs’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.