Shaping a cohesive brand identity and design system for UK Charity SHH-UK
Project: Brand Consultation + Redesign
Role: Design Lead Volunteer | UI Designer | Graphic Designer
Industry: NonProfit
Tools: Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Wordpress, Microsoft 365 SharePoint, MailPoet
The Challenge
Since SHH-UK's inception in 2023, the nonprofit's brand language has developed organically across documentation, social media and the organisation's website without governance or oversight.
Volunteer and trustee involvement in asset creation across digital and print channels has led to fragmentation of the visual identity, with content siloed locally amongst individual contributors.
The Requirement
The initial requirement around documentation design was gathered into a larger piece of work, defined as reshaping the visual identity and ensuring the brand language can be easily communicated.
With many visitors to SHH-UK's website and other channels living with Long Covid, it was vital to reframe the visual language in accommodating these users by reducing cognitive load to minimise working memory demands.
A Brand Identity Guideline was constructed for this purpose to outline the refreshed brand and allow for distribution amongst both trustees and volunteers during their onboarding with SHH-UK.
View the Brand Identity GuidelineThe Solution
First steps were agreed as defining a revised colour palette, aligned to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AA standard and reimagined to reduce glare and eye strain from pure white.
A new typographic solution, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next®, was proposed, and is currently in adoption across digital and print channels as a typeface focused on letterform distinction.
Bespoke image collections were funded to evolve the SHH-UK photographic language beyond free-to-air material and a new icon style was also proposed, with three distinct sets defining simple, standard and complex icons now in production.
With the brand identity guidelines approved and available to trustees and volunteers, this was then translated onto both existing and new documentation and assets for digital and print purposes.
Internal and external-facing collateral has been redesigned in line with the new brand identity guideline.
The monthly SHH-UK newsletter is now templated within MailPoet, providing users a simple, easy to understand template structure on which to build each new edition, reducing time spent on formatting and image placement.
A centralised Brand Repository was later proposed and provisioned within the charity's SharePoint tenancy, giving volunteers access to all brand resources through a permissions-based communication site that can now be shared with contributors on a case-by-case basis.
As part of a proposal around long-term strategic considerations, a reimagined web presence has been wireframed within Figma for presentation to and discussion with both Trustees and Volunteers.
Tools & Technologies
