Crafting a brand to inspire change and create lasting legacies

The Peter Harrison Foundation is an independent grant-making organisation, contributing over £50m to projects across the UK. The Foundation fund life-changing projects for disadvantaged and disabled people, creating enriching opportunities for self-development. We worked with this amazing organisation on an exciting branding project to create an identity that would be contemporary, accessible and adaptable, and celebrate the positive impact of the Foundation.

Our first big challenge was to inject a sense of personality into the logo and expand the identity, creating more touch-points for recognition, positioning The Peter Harrison Foundation as a catalyst for change. The brand needed to be inspiring and show the potential people have to create lasting legacies of their own. We also needed to address the balance of the logo wording that would put more emphasis on the Harrison family name. Another key focus was to create a system to visually differentiate the two main grants the Foundation offers, while maintaining a distinct and consistent look.

With a finalised brand in place, we then needed to design and build a fully accessible, flexible and intuitive website.

To elevate the brand, we focused on a simpler, more contemporary and cleaner approach. The new icon is inspired by the world of sport and an active lifestyle – a key priority of one of the Foundation’s grant streams. The icon also embodies a greater focus on the Harrison family name and uses the mark as a fitting metaphor for the next stage of the Foundation.

A pattern was introduced to represent the two core grants available from the Foundation – Active Lives and Positive Futures. The Active Lives pattern finds inspiration in the track markings of sports fields and courts. Positive Futures takes a more humanist approach by channelling the rings of a tree, ripples in water or a fingerprint. The patterns are used to signpost content relevant to each programme, creating a simple signifier to aid navigation and find-ability.

We rooted the colour palette in the legacy dark blue and introduced a complimentary electric blue to add a flash of personality. The typefaces were updated to be simpler and more robust, utilising a modern sans serif with highly accessible characters.

Turning to the website, we designed an engaging and celebratory site, promoting intuitive navigation and discoverability. With The Peter Harrison Foundation team in mind, we ensured that the backend was easy to use and offered a huge amount of flexibility.