Before designing anything, I audited why the agency's version hadn't landed. Their solution centred on a location-pin mark — a sensible-seeming choice for a place-based programme, but one that already carries fixed public meaning: it means Google Maps, it means finding a listing on Airbnb. Asking the public to layer an entirely new set of values onto a symbol they already fluently read as something else was an uphill battle the brief was never going to win.

The fix wasn't a better pin — it was recognising that a single brandmark was being asked to carry too much at once, and that borrowing an existing symbol's equity would always fight against that message rather than for it. I designed a new, neutral mark instead: a blank page the intended meaning could be built onto over time. The final geometry takes its cue from a bench — chosen because benches are genuinely everywhere, in every town, and are where community actually happens: where locals rest, where friends meet. Overlooked, but a real cornerstone of local life — exactly the story Pride in Place needed to tell.

UK Infrastructure Bank

Best Start In Life

Pride in Place

UK & Ukraine — 100 Years

WRF World Cup