As you may have noticed, Gateway Family Services has a new logo. In fact, we’ve got a whole new brand – so we thought it might be nice to give you a peek behind the scenes at the changes.
When Gateway was founded, over ten years ago, a standalone logo was created for use on all our marketing literature. At the same time, we created our Core Values, Aims and Objectives – and these remain at the heart of everything we do. But what we didn’t do at the time was to bring these together as part of a consistent overall “brand”. We have strong professional values, and very high standards for all of our work, but for many years, our marketing materials haven’t really matched those high standards.
The Gateway logo has been simplified and modernised
So, over the last few months, we have been working with designer and branding expert Lisa Barratt to understand and formalise the “Gateway brand”. This didn’t just mean creating a new logo, but looking at everything we put out into the wider world: making sure our public face reflects our values and the high standards of professionalism that we have internally, and giving everything a consistent, well thought-out look and feel.
Lisa worked closely with a panel of Gateway staff to find out everything about the way we work, and to make sure the new branding would be a realistic representation of our organisation.
Photographer David Rann did a great job of capturing moments between our staff and the people they support
Lisa recognised that, for Gateway, our brand is our people. So wherever possible, our marketing literature now uses our own photos showing staff and the people they work with in real situations. The new photos (taken by David Rann) show Gateway as we see ourselves – positive, professional, friendly and honest, with an emphasis on relationships and community.
Our “tone of voice” – the voice we use online and in printed materials – is key, so we’ve set out some formal rules for this too, based on the way our staff already communicate with people. Gateway is friendly, open and accessible, so our leaflets and posters will be written to speak directly to the people we support. All our marketing and social media will use a conversational, but professional, tone.
The new colour scheme brings services together
The new logo is a simplified, modernised version of the previous one, including the recognisable “G” symbol. But we now have a wider colour palette to use alongside the main logo’s blue and gold. We’ve assigned a specific colour to each service: pink for POWS, teal for Health Trainers, light blue for Lighten Up, and a pale purple for other services.
One of the things that staff really wanted was for the different services to feel more aligned with each other and with the Gateway name; we hope that the new colour palette and templates will not only provide consistency, but help people to recognise that each service is part of the Gateway whole.
We launched the new brand internally last week – with a quiz and some nibbles!
Working with staff to refresh the brand means we’ve also been able to pick up on some other useful ideas and requests from staff. In particular, we’re creating some specially-designed “congratulations” and “sorry I missed you” cards for support workers to give to clients.
We’ll also be publishing some new hand-outs focusing on some of our areas of expertise, including things like breastfeeding advice and healthy recipe suggestions. Our staff are full of knowledge, so it would be a shame not to share it more!
We hope you’ll enjoy spotting the new Gateway logo and marketing materials as they make their way out into the wider world.
It’s great looking logo. Friendly and professional.