The situation

ACT’s brand identity required definition and the organisation was seeing many examples of inconsistency in communications across its brands and solutions, and customer touch points. Its current visual identity was overly corporate and muted, it needed to be brought in line with its North Star and rooted in its strategy.

The approach

Our work began with defining the clients’ brand personality to establish a set of human characteristics associated with the brand that its stakeholders could relate to. Having a clear brand personality is a critical foundation for all brand related work as it sets the basis for development of brand strategy tenets such as tone of voice or visual identity, and provides a bedrock for strategic communications and campaigns. An organisation’s brand personality needs to differentiate it within the market and be recognisable. With a set of design principles and personae, we ran multiple stakeholder interviews and workshops to score and rank brand personality attributes using proven brand personality frameworks. Using the outputs gathered, we built a brand personality that was clear, succinct and differentiated and provided us with a foundation to build out additional assets.

A comprehensive set of user friendly tone of voice guidelines was produced in partnership with the client. The guidelines covered goals and principles, how to communicate, grammar, punctuation, writing well for the web and email, tools and tips and a word bank. The guide was brought to life through before and after examples, and split out into smaller chunks to enable easy and quick onboarding, along with more detail for those users who required it.

Evolving a subdued and limited visual identity

Mindyasa were tasked with the challenge to evolve the current visual ID which was very corporate, subdued and limited to an identity that was aligned to the organisation’s North Star and brand personality, ownable and different.

To initiate the design work, Mindyasa led a competitor review workshop for which we produced design boards showing the visual identities of key competitors and other admired brands. Each board featured a comprehensive sweep of visual identity assets, summaries and discussion point prompts. This immersive workshop led to great conversations and ideas as to what the client liked, what resonated and what didn’t.

Based on these conversations, four distinct design directions were produced, all grounded in the organisation’s North star and brand personality. One of the themes ‘Journeys’ was selected for further exploration and built out to an evolved visual identity framework which included a new simplified, bright colour palette, photography guidelines, graphical design elements, iconography and an evolved use of typography and the existing logo mark.

The framework was developed to be used as a foundational tool for all design work, by both internal design teams and external agencies.

Other brand strategy assets produced included a new brand architecture and supporting governance documentation, and an enterprise value proposition.

Key deliverables

• A clear and differentiated brand personality
• An evolved visual identity framework
• Tone of voice guidelines
• Enterprise-wide value proposition
• Brand architecture
• A brand kit bringing multiple brand strategy elements together

ACT is a federally registered trademark of ACT, Inc.