My project in Contemporary Brand Identity: Using Verbal and Visual Branding: Human Appeal

Here's an example of a complete project which reflects all the stages of my course. I hope you find it useful and feel free to ask questions if anything is unclear...

Human Appeal is a Manchester-based humanitarian NGO that has been in existence for over 25 years and has strong links with the Muslim community. The organisation's aim was to revitalise their brand in a way that would allow them to broaden their humanitarian work and appeal to more secular audiences, without alienating their historical supporter base.

In much the same way that Oxfam – once a faith based organisation – has 'moved', their long-term aim is to also move to a wider base of supporters.

In our initial discussions, it seemed that ‘what’ they do – reacting immediately to humanitarian emergencies, restoring shattered lives and reinforcing communities – could be our verbal ‘hook’. But as the project progressed it became clear that we should take our steer from their name to drive the core narrative.

As we began the design stage, our initial ideas focused on typography. Then we realised that in the field, across 25 countries, a symbol that could be identified from 100 metres by non-English speakers would be invaluable. So we started a search for a new, universal symbol of humanity.

This proved to be challenging – until we combined an ‘H’ for ‘human appeal’ with a symbol of a person. By simply turning the marque 45 degrees, we had uncovered an image with the two meanings we were searching for – and the angle added a useful sense of urgency.

Human Appeal does a vast array of work and reaches out to multiple audiences, so typographically we’re using the entire DIN Next family, which allows us the use of a stencil in times of crisis, and a very good Arabic equivalent.

We’ve also developed a whole series of patterns to add a further layer of identification. The scheme has now been completely rolled out across print, merchandise, advertising, web and social media.