Life Sciences Hub Wales

Background and brief

Starting life as a membership organisation in 2014, Life Sciences Hub Wales’ focus and strategic direction has since evolved considerably. Today, the organisation aims to inspire innovation and collaboration between industry, research organisations and health and social care sectors to improve the health and wellbeing outcomes for people in Wales.

While the organisation has evolved, its brand had not been refreshed since its inception, so the Communications Team at Life Sciences Hub Wales commissioned jamjar to refresh its brand and update its brand guidelines accordingly so they were fit for purpose moving forward.

What we did

Brand discovery workshop

One of the first thing we did was to host a brand discovery workshop where we were able to dig deeper into the organisation to understand its history, how it has evolved and what its aspirations are for the future. This helped us to identify what areas of the brand were out of date and what needed refreshing.

Tweaked the logo

The Life Sciences Hub Wales logo is instantly recognisable within its marketplace, so we didn’t want to change it for the sake of it. However, its current composition was making it difficult to apply digitally. The balance between the ‘Hub’ symbol and the name of the organisation within the logo was also causing issues from a communications perspective. As the ‘Hub’ was so prominent it was detracting from the organisation’s name – Life Sciences Hub Wales – and leading people to call it The Hub Wales. We applied some small but significant tweaks to the symbol and font to alleviate these issues.

Updated the brand guidelines

Once the adjustments had been made to its logo, we made some small changes to its typography and colour palette before creating new brand guidelines detailing how the logo should be applied to ensure consistency going forwards.

We also updated its verbal identity to bring cohesion across the brand.

To bring to life what the organisation does and why it does it, we created some new visual devices to apply across the brand.

This included the introduction of a dotted arrow, strong people-focussed imagery and a suite of icons.

We then created a suite of templates to show how the new visual identity could be applied across its brand communications.

Results

Life Sciences Hub Wales now has a cohesive visual and verbal identity and a strong brand to grow from.

It’s been a real pleasure working with jamjar on the Life Sciences Hub Wales’ brand refresh. They fully understood the brief from day one, and executed the brand growth with vibrance and subtlety (as requested). The feedback from internal and external colleagues has been nothing but positive. Thank you for making the journey so seamless.

Dawn Bratcher
Head of Communications and Public Relations