Life Cycle
Balancing a charity’s brand personality with accessibility
A visual brand identity that gives a sense of movement and fun to a cycling charity on a mission to transform both lives and the environment.
The challenge
How do you bring the vibrant, can-do personality of a charity to life, while keeping accessibility, diversity and inclusion at the forefront of the design? It’s not easy, but it’s absolutely possible.
Life Cycle is a small charity that operates in Bristol, Derby and parts of the South West. It helps people experience the benefits of cycling – from learning to ride to exploring careers in the industry, including accredited training for people in prison.
The Life Cycle team approached Beehive Green as part of its wider digital transformation. They wanted me to create a fresh, vibrant new look to engage a broad and diverse range of people while they focused on developing their brand strategy and voice in-house.
“Life Cycle has big ambitions for growth, but we didn’t have the brand tools to achieve what we wanted”, explains Becky Whitlock, the charity’s Marketing Manager. “We saw Andrea’s fun, bold, engaging design work and knew she was the right choice for us.”
Project scope
• Visual brand identity
• Brand guidelines
• Design templates
• Print design
A sense of movement
The concept behind the new brand identity is the cycling journey that Life Cycle takes people on. The cycling journey unites the charity’s audiences.
I designed a distinctive new logo that embodies this. The logo expresses the brand’s personality – bold and sturdy with warm curves that make it feel accessible, safe and friendly. The tail of the ‘y’ forms a cycling route and inspired the journey graphic device that’s used throughout the new visual identity system to infuse vibrancy and movement.
The journey graphic features colourful connectors joining to form a continuous journey trail. The Life Cycle team can adapt the graphic to suit the communication it appears on, giving a sense of connection, freedom and fun wherever it appears. It builds recognition across touchpoints without detracting from the brand’s accessibility.
The soft, curved styling is reflected again in the bespoke linear icon sets. Together, the brand graphics form a robust, versatile visual brand system.
Broad appeal
Life Cycle helps thousands of people each year. People of all ages, abilities and backgrounds. People with a diverse range of needs, and at every stage of their cycling journey. This wide audience made diversity and inclusion central to the rebrand.
We put Life Cycle’s people at the heart of its new look. A candid photography style embraces the diversity of the charity’s communities and workplaces. It shows real people connecting on their cycling journey in a way that’s likely to resonate. Down-to-earth and filter-free feel, it feels warm, genuine and inclusive.
Colour came next. We retained the existing ‘Life Cycle Blue’ for its strong heritage and brand recognition. I paired it with fresh turquoise to strengthen the core palette and added secondary accent colours – yellow, lilac and white – for an uplifting feel. The overall effect is vibrant and practical.
As you would expect for a charity focused on accessibility, the tone of voice is clear, open and honest. It puts the audience first.
The brand typeface, Albert Sans, perfectly captures this voice too, with easy-to-read letterforms and a friendly personality. I chose an open-source typeface from Google Fonts as it’s free of charge for teams across the charity to use – however they use it – with no licensing complications. What could be more accessible?
Accessibility matters
Building accessibility into the Life Cycle identity was our priority. It’s estimated that more than 15% of the UK population is neurodivergent. One in every 25 people is visually impaired, one in 12 is colour-blind, and one in 10 has dyslexia. Eighty per cent of disabilities are invisible, and on top of that, our population is ageing.
This rebrand shows it’s possible to create a visual identity that’s full of personality, while not compromising on accessibility. Here’s how:
All text is set at 12 point or bigger, ranged left and in sentence case to make communications easy for everyone to read. The typographic system has a clear and simple hierarchy for content, using a legible sans serif typeface.
The colour palette is colour-blind safe, contrast-checked and compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (known as WCAG) level AA rating.
The graphic language features iconography to help people navigate written content, particularly benefiting those whose first language is not English.
The brand guidelines set out accessibility best practice to make sure the brand identity is always used as intended.
A versatile logo suite
This brand identity needed to be recognisable across a range of applications, from environment branding and training materials to uniforms and merchandise.
With this in mind, I designed secondary horizontal logos as well as sub-brand logos for the Life Cycle Café and the Life Cycle Hub workshops. These maintain consistency with the core visual brand while also having distinct identities of their own.
The brand symbol – which features the cycling route in the logo – can also be used independently to enhance brand recognition across various scenarios, including having it embroidered onto clothing.
Designed to be practical
The visual identity system was designed to be simple and practical for the in-house marketing team and volunteers who’ll be using it day-to-day. To enable them to roll out the new look easily, I also designed branded social media and poster templates.
To get launch ready, I implemented the new brand identity across digital and print assets including a letterhead, postcard and social banners.
I also acted as brand guardian throughout the web design process, working with the team and their partners at a specialist Webflow agency to ensure the visual identity was applied correctly, achieving the right impact across the new website.
The final deliverable was a set of comprehensive brand guidelines the team can refer to going forward to create a coherent look. The guidelines detail the brand strategy and voice developed in-house, as well as explaining how to use the new visual identity.
Clear communications and flexibility
This rebranding project was complex and required buy-in from stakeholders across the organisation. We kept it on track by involving key representatives every step of the way, adjusting draft concepts as needed so they worked effectively for each part of the charity.
“Andrea really ‘got’ the brief”, explains Becky. “Her clear, straightforward communications and flexibility made the rebrand process enjoyable. We always knew where we stood and felt well guided through the process, knowing what to expect (and what was expected) at every stage.”
Client feedback
“We’re delighted with the results! Our marketing team have been creating assets using the new branding and I know it’s been a pleasure, as well as making life so much easier. We set Andrea a real challenge to cover so many audiences and offers while maintaining an inclusive and accessible brand identity, but she more than rose to it – and we’re thrilled with the outcome!
We’ve had so much positive feedback from stakeholders and I know our new look will be instrumental in helping Life Cycle grow sustainably in future.”
— Becky Whitlock, Marketing Manager, Life Cycle
A strong foundation for the future
“Andrea has helped us build a strong foundation to build our future goals upon and present our best foot forward to our audiences”, says Becky. “We’ve gone from having a very outdated brand identity that let our comms down and was difficult to work with, to having a brand identity we’re excited to share with the world. The change has been immense!”
I’m excited to see this rebrand help Life Cycle achieve its vision. I wish the team all the best – I’d love to see a world with clean air and healthier people, where cycling is the norm for short journeys. We need more organisations like Life Cycle to make a positive impact on the world!
Life Cycle’s visual identity before the rebrand
