Creating an inclusive brand for an industry revolution

Consultation

We began with a conversation with Inclu Group’s leadership team about the goals for their business over the coming years, their wider industry, and the needs of their partners and clients. We talked about what they liked about their branding at the time, and where they needed it to be better. They wanted to retain a distinctive ‘i’ icon and ensure that no accessibility considerations were lost, but update the colours, typography and icon itself to be modern, clean and instantly recognisable across multiple brands and use cases.

Creative

In our planning stages we gathered research on the latest developments in accessible design, and used these considerations as Inclu Group do – as inspiration, not limitation. Once we had this unique best practice guide and a clear set of principles, we started playing. We began with the parent brand and icon, the ‘Inclu i’, and created a diverse group of concepts to present to our client. Each one was very different in style, but met the brief and best practice guidelines equally. These concepts included demonstrations of how it could be used in practice – its colour palette, its typography, and its incorporation into graphics.

Development

Once our client had chosen their favourite, we iterated on the concept through a process of feedback and consultation, to refine the details until it was ready to be applied across their entire portfolio. The ‘i’ icon was developed to be a graphical device as well as a distinctive icon, representing opening the door to inclusivity We chose a brand font that had been specifically developed to aid neurodivergent readers with processing and comprehension, but was also modern and stylish, and applied this across all of their sub-brands. A unique colour was chosen for each brand, that gave each one its own identity and provided the contrast needed for readers with low vision and colour vision deficiencies.

We then exported all of their brand logos in multiple formats, ready for any eventuality, and pulled all of our work together into a polished brand guidelines document. This included guidelines to logo usage, their brand colours, font details and guides on how to tie everything together for use.