Naming, Branding, Website Design & Development
Devon, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly has its own Local Resilience Forum (LRF); similar to all other regions of the UK. LRF websites are intended to be community hubs, informing people how to prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies.
To relaunch community awareness of the forum, we were asked to rebrand the Devon, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly LRF and create an innovative new website.
LRFs are often overlooked or not known about, their long title causing confusion as to their role. This project seemed like a brilliant opportunity to rethink how people may better understand and relate to their LRF, to maximise community impact in emergency planning, response and recovery. The pithy, memorable wordmark 'We are prepared' bite-sizes the aims of the LRF and is the anchor point for the new brand, as well as being the new website address.
Visually, the striking new branding couples graphical chevron shapes – commonly found on emergency response vehicles; with a heavily serifed headline typeface – often associated with printed news media. The colour palette of navy blue, hi-viz red and slate grey, themes the website and supports the narrative of preparing for, responding to and recovering from emergencies.
Providing the right information to communities in times of emergency could prove invaluable. A particular focus of the website brief was to create a ‘Live Event Dashboard’; to aggregate responses from regional and national emergency services, news and weather, health and utilities. The solution required pulling together hundreds of different live social media posts and website widgets, into an intuitive user experience that worked seamlessly across all digital devices.
The new branding scheme and innovative website design for the Devon, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly LRF was enthusiastically received and promoted as an example of best practise; the Live Event Dashboard being cited as an invaluable resource to help both communities and responders in emergency situations.
In addition to launching the new website in the near future for the Devon, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly LRF; it is hoped that other regional LRFs from around the UK see the value in centralising their messaging, branding and responses to most efficiently serve their communities when they need them- ‘We are prepared’ could become the brandmark for all LRFs.
