Over the next months we will gradually be introducing our refreshed brand and visual style and will be launching our new and improved website.
Our new logo and visual style, produced by designer Jenny Johnson, retains much of the character of The Pituitary Foundation’s well known style of the past, whilst shifting to a more modern and accessible look to help us reach as many people as possible with our resources and support.
For our new website, we’ve been working with the fantastic user experience agency Deckchair and website experts at Appeal Digital who have generously donated much of their time. After speaking to our community, we recognise that our current site has become difficult to navigate and inaccessible to many. As well as this, the website software that we use was becoming obsolete, so we urgently needed to update the site. This new website will be an invaluable resource for our charity and community.
We’ve been working on the project with this Bristol super-team for a while now and can’t wait for you to see the results.
Look out for the new brand to start appearing on our social channels in the coming weeks and our new website will be launching in spring, with greatly improved accessibility for the people we support, our fundraisers, and healthcare professionals.
If you want to find out more about the process and what to expect from the new brand and website, read on…
Why the change?
Our current brand has served us well over the last eight years, but we felt it was time to modernise the look. We wanted a brand refresh rather than a full rebrand, as we know that our orange colour is well recognised and makes us stand out at events. However, some of our core colours when used together in design provided accessibility difficulties as there wasn’t a clear enough contrast. The brand refresh gave us an opportunity to have a fresh look at what we want our brand to represent and how to make it accessible to as many as possible.
As mentioned earlier, our website was in urgent need of an update for multiple reasons, and the new site addresses these issues and is redesigned using our all-new visual style.
Brand refresh
The process of the brand refresh started in summer 2022. We had staff workshops to talk about our existing brand, our values, and the core work of The Pituitary Foundation. Our designer then worked on initial concepts based on the outcome of the workshops. Throughout the whole process we were grateful to speak to key stakeholders, including staff members, trustees, medical professionals, volunteers, and patients. Using the feedback and going through multiple design stages, we now have a brand that we are proud of. We have kept the orange and added in some colours that work visually but also meet accessibility requirements. Alongside the new colour palette, we also have new fonts and visual elements like illustrations and imagery which provide us with the tools to communicate our brand in a way that properly reflects our personality and ambitions.
The biggest change though is the new logo and a tagline! Many people have never heard of the pituitary gland, and especially, The Pituitary Foundation. We wanted a tagline that told people what it is we do. We think that: ‘For hormones, for health, for life’ really encapsulates this. ‘For hormones’ because the pituitary gland controls the hormones in the body. ‘For Health’ indicates that we are first and foremost a health charity. ‘For life’ covers the idea that pituitary conditions are often lifelong and we are here to support people that need it throughout your whole pituitary journey. Together ‘for health, for life’ brings the focus to wellbeing/holistic health and lifestyle and adds a feeling of vitality.
The new logo features an orange dot next to the words The Pituitary Foundation. The dot continues the theme of the swirl that is above the i on the current logo. This is intended to represent the pituitary gland, but during our research we found that many people didn’t realise that!
If you follow us on social media then you’ll soon see the new brand and logo appearing. It will also be present on the new website when it launches in a couple of months’ time. Our print booklets, as well as The Pituitary Life magazine, will all get an update too. We are hoping to start working on the booklets later in spring. In the meantime, the information in the existing booklets is still relevant, it just has the previous branding.
New website
For the website, we worked with user experience design agency Deckchair to discover the key sticking points of the current website, what was working well and what needed changing. During this process, we also spoke to endocrinologists to understand what they wanted from The Pituitary Foundation website. One of the key ways that people hear about our services is through their endocrinologist, so it is essential that we are reaching medical professionals with our website.
As part of the process we had a design sprint which was a really intense week where we ‘sprinted’ through and created a prototype of the new website. We carried out user testing of the new site with volunteers and patients, and luckily, they all thought it was great and a big improvement from our current site. It was important to get feedback from the people actually using the site.
The prototype and brand assets are now with the website development team Appeal Digital who are creating the site with the plan for this to be ready by the end of March. Over the past couple of months, we have been rewriting a lot of the content on the website and will continue to do so to make sure everything is up to date and easy to access.
Looking forward
The brand refresh will give us a clear identity so that our resources can be easily recognised. We hope that by having a fresh, new look with logo and tagline that we will be able to reach more people who may need our support.
We’re so excited for you all to see the new look in detail when we launch the new website. We hope that these changes will allow us to reach new audiences and make our information clearer and easier to access. The new website will also be easier to manage for our staff and volunteers, freeing up time for them to work on other important task for our charity’s development.
Keep an eye out for the new site, it’ll still be the same web address: www.pituitary.org.uk
We would like to thank everyone who has offered their time to help us through this process, from contractors who donated time and to everyone in the pituitary community who have provided feedback.
And, thank you as always for your support as we work on our promise to empower everyone in the pituitary community, every step of the way.
