Centrepoint

Creating greater brand reach through accessible design

Centrepoint had gone through a rebrand. This brand was working well for them, however they accessibility hadn’t been addressed during the rebrand process. Centrepoint brought us on board to help them define accessibility guidance and a suite of set templates that would help their teams create on-brand accessible marketing materials and reports.

Brand accessibility audit + Team training + Accessibility guidelines + Accessible template design

Getting immersed in the issues

During our immersion period, we delved deep and found the root causes of their challenges and identified key areas for improvement. Within a busy and hard working charity like centrepoint its not just the design team that need to be creating branded materials. The wider team was in need of resources that would allow them to easily create strong branded communications with ease.

Accessibility was a top priority for Centrepoint, a charitable organisation closely connected with diverse groups of people. Therefore it aligned with their strong stance on inclusivity, and good business sense for their brand to adopt accessible design for their service users, donors, and internal staff alike.

We devised a project structure to systematically address their challenges. This included a full brand accessibility audit, team training, creating clear accessibility guidelines, and designing templates for Canva and Word to streamline the creation of branded materials across the organisation and the sign off process for the internal design team.

Identifying access challenges, the auditing process

We conducted a thorough brand accessibility audit for Centrepoint. This allowed us to identify areas where they excelled in accessible design and pinpointed areas for improvement. Assessing colour, typography, image usage layout design and digital document standards.

We discovered key issues related to their use of colour and typography. By simplifying font guidelines, we created a system that enabled their team to effortlessly produce accessible marketing materials that would always stand out.

For their colour palette, we assessed both their online and offline colour palette for print and screen usage and devised a list of accessible type and colour combinations, ruling out any that weren’t on-brand during the process. Simplifying the design process again for their team.

Empowering teams through education and training

A key part of the process was not only to help Centrepoint’s team create accessible design but also for them to be more knowledgeable about what accessible design entails and why it is so important.

Defining a clear and accessible system

It was important that the opportunities highlighted in the audit became clear guidance that was easy to implement and maintain for the Centrepoint team. We brought concise guidance together for their typography colour, image usage and layout. That was then built into their existing brand guidelines. Seamlessly integrating with the guidance they already had.

Creating templates that cut through the noise

Centrepoint have a very broad range of marketing materials and communications that they need to be able to create in their fast-paced world. We created a suite of accessible templates that would make creating impactful comms simple. These ranged from email newsletters, simple brochure designs and flexible report templates.

Report templates to engage as well as inform

Getting their message out isn’t always about the short impactful fundraising messaging. Centrepoint’s reports are a key part of their communications. For the report templates, we created a balanced bold design with a simple system that would be able to flex for a variety of report styles.

Bold call to actions, pull-out copy and areas for statistics helped to create space to celebrate all of the good work Centrepoint do day-to-day.

Built-in accessibility features were set up to make sure that PDFs would be automatically optimised for screen readers.

Creating a real impact

Since launching the accessibility guidance and the brand templates Centrepoint’s brand and design team have found the design process for the wider Centrepoint team has been quicker and smoother. Maintaining the integrity of their new branding is much simpler, making sure that it has the consistency and longevity they need.