The Sutton Trust is the leading UK social mobility charity, working to liberate young people’s life chances from the socio-economic backgrounds they were born into. They needed a refreshed, coherent brand and visual identity that would amplify their important work.
A visual system with meaning for the UK’s leading social mobility charity
The Sutton Trust had a well-established brand, though they recognised it had become blunted and incoherent over time. As a visual identity, it had become tangled through misuse, introducing inconsistencies and accessibility issues along the way.
They approached us to redefine their brand and build a large suite of beautiful and user-friendly templates, as well as detailed guidelines for the brand’s use. These would force consistency within and across outputs, as well as making life easier for their own teams.
As a starting point, we carried out internal stakeholder interviews and an external audience survey to get a deeper understanding of the pain points, how the organisation was viewed from within and without, and how they wanted it to be seen.
We also hosted a workshop to explore the various audiences that the Trust would be speaking with. The aim here was to understand the flexibility that would be needed in the branding, as well as the specific requirements of the Trust’s programme leads.
With a strong grounding in the Trust’s needs and drivers, we were able to rebuild the visual identity. The existing logo became the inspiration for a new ‘brand idea’: shape your future. We brought this to life as a series of abstract graphics depicting ‘ambition’ and as the overall optimistic tone to hit throughout.
We pulled the blue brand colour to the forefront as the true lead colour, combining it with a broad supporting palette. This colour range strikes the right tone of ‘celebratory but grounded’ and, importantly, provides the variety needed for the Trust’s data visualisations, as well as for its many programmes and activities.
We revisited the Trust’s guidelines on typography, introducing the characterful National 2 Condensed Bold (by Klim Type) as the primary brand font. This change balances a sense of bold positivity with improved legibility and clarity.
We made recommendations on the photographic style, balancing real life moments with proud, cheerful portrait photography for cover visuals.
With the branding approved, we applied it to a full suite of freshly designed, user-friendly templates, including research reports, briefings, posters, banners, slide decks, newsletters and social media.
The Soapbox team were fantastic to work with. They delivered exactly what we wanted – a creative, flexible and practical approach to our brand that reflects the full breadth of our work and audiences.
We know from experience that it’s vital to bring teams along on a branding journey, if the brand is to be used and enjoyed. So we included onboarding towards the end of the project, talking to team members about the purpose and potential of the new visual identity, and supporting them to put it into practice.
The new visual style and components still had to be rolled out into the Trust’s website as well, so we provided art direction for the updated website design, which was carried out by The Web Kitchen.
The result was a functional and cohesive – but highly flexible – identity, with seamless templates that significantly increase efficiency and give the teams more time for the important work they do. There is now an overarching brand, and brand idea, that the team are proud to carry forward.
