Nuffield Council on Bioethics – Brand alignment and website for a leading policy and research centre

2024 – ongoing

WebsitesBrand

Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) is a leading independent policy and research centre that identifies, analyses and advises on ethical issues in biomedicine and health for the benefit of people and society.

We partnered with NCOB on a major project to update and align their brand with their main funder, Nuffield Foundation, and its sister organisations. This progressed into the design and build of a new website that more effectively targets their policy audience and showcases their work on future trends.

Aligning the brand

NCOB’s brand had existed in its previous form since 1991 and had become misaligned with other members of the Nuffield Foundation’s brand family. An extensive rebrand of the Foundation in 2020 had introduced a framework for increased coherence with funded institutions such as the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Nuffield Family Justice observatory.

Common aspects of the framework include a strict approach to redrawn logos, a secondary house font family and a continual line motif. Beyond that, bespoke family styles were very open to interpretation and exploration.

Maintaining independence

Our initial work looked at NCOB’s specific organisational objectives, audience needs and their requirement to remain an individual entity within the larger whole. A small set of exercises in a group workshop helped us understand what makes them tick and subsequent desk research and conversations helped to round out the full picture. This informed the foundation of the brand work and the website development.

We presented three design directions focused around a small number of brand deliverables across channels: a notional website homepage, a print publication cover and example social media posts. With changes to the logo and secondary typeface not on the table we were free to push at the edges of the brand framework, exploring different approaches with the palette, primary typography, pattern, and imagery.

A cross-channel launch

We made fast progress on the brand work and were able to rapidly apply this to the website design and other deliverables such as social templates in Canva, presentations in Powerpoint, newsletters in Campaign Monitor and report templates in Adobe InDesign. To complete the picture, online brand guidelines were built using the Standards platform.

Addressing a policy audience

An important focus of the website project was to more effectively address a policy audience. This was achieved by supplementing NCOB’s existing in-depth analysis of topics with engaging new formats that provide up-to-date insights for decision makers.

This was supported by improved navigation and search, cross-linking of content and more intuitive user journeys overall. The block-based approach to building page layouts provides NCOB with much more flexibility, and a dynamic in-page navigation allows them to move away from PDF’s to more accessible long-form HTML content.

NCOB also had a wealth of content that stretched back as far as 1993, which needed to be carefully migrated.

Horizon scanning

An important part of NCOB’s work involves identifying future developments in biomedicine and health. Each year, they publish a ‘horizon scan’ identifying key topics across three timeframes they think could begin to raise ethical implications in the UK.

In the past this content had been published as static infographics. To coincide with the launch of the website we developed an interactive horizon scanning tool that allows users to scroll along a time-based axis and select topics that have been grouped into short, medium and long term sections. Each topic provides an overview and allows users to access more in-depth related content.