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Soundwell is a local charity providing music therapy for adults whose lives are seriously affected by mental illness. Following an appeal from the Quartet Community Foundation via Bristol Creative Industries, we donated our time to carry out a brand refresh that would help them move forward and achieve their goals.

Although based in Bristol, the charity has nothing to do with Soundwell – the suburb. Their name actually represents what it is they do – helping people recover from mental illness through the use of sound.

Once we identified this problem, we looked at how we could solve the confusion with the new brand identity. First, we visually separated the words ‘sound’ and ‘well’ by upweighting and italicising the latter. We then took this a step further by creating several colour pairings for the two words. This, alongside the softer feeling sans-serif typeface, helped retain the playful nature of their original logo. Something the charity were very keen to do.

Another problem the charity faced was the use of imagery, they had a very limited photo library and most of the people they helped didn’t want to be photographed or appear in any of their communications. We produced a set of hand drawn illustrations of the instruments used in their therapy sessions to use across posters, leaflets and the new website, which helped convey the human element of their work without showing people.

As well as all of the visual changes we also worked closely with the clients to develop their  brand positioning. The new positioning statement, In tune with Mental health, helps the charity define the sector they work in and how they go about it.

“Stuff have been fantastic to work with on our recent rebranding. They paid very close attention to the brief and, crucially for us, they were responsive to our concerns about how the branding would be received by the people we work with. We have constraints on the kind of images we use, and the accessibility of our communications, and Stuff managed these complicated requirements sensitively as the branding developed.  We don’t have in-house expertise on this kind of work, but we never felt that our questions were foolish, or the issues we raised were too much trouble. I’ve worked in charity communications for 18 years and have been part of multiple rebrands: this has been by far the most pleasant and positive process I’ve been involved with.”

Anne Phipps CEO