Amplifying the brand and website of a people-first trade union

Advance Union are an independent union in place to support all Santander employees, providing confidential advice, information, help, and guidance. Their visual identity and website had become outdated, and inflexible and simply didn’t do justice to the incredible service they were providing to their members. The new brand design and website needed to communicate at a human level, emphasising their values and benefits to new and existing members.

From early on in our immersion stage, we felt the ‘your voice at work’ strap-line perfectly captured both the functional and very personal sides of Advance’s offering and should play a key role in the new identity. Using this idea as a jumping-off point, we developed the concept of a shared language between Advance and its members, distilling the A and U of Advance Union into basic geometric shapes which converge to form the brand mark and the wider graphical language. Coupled with a bold colour palette, custom illustration and iconography were employed to create a more contemporary and conversational tone.

Following this extensive brand design work, we turned our focus to the website. Using data analytics and user insight our team constructed clear and user-friendly UX journeys, allowing users to navigate to relevant information with ease and tackling the main sticking points relating to user access, navigation to content, and automated systems.

The website uses CiviCRM to manage the union’s memberships and a large part of the development process was to migrate all the current membership data from Drupal to WordPress.