Proceeding as planned, a last-minute intervention from the political senior leadership team was requested. Under hyper-specific instruction, the logo and identity was re-designed to a new brief as a play off of street name designs. This concept introduced a location customisable design through the postcode element.
The OUTCOME
This testing deck was the final stage submission for identifying the core function and objective required of the Pride in Place logo. Suggesting two alternate options which solved that challenge in different ways. The first, a minimalistic brandmark, something new, and a slightly different approach to Government branding projects. The second a more traditional copy based approach that mitigated comprehension risk.
Fig.01 — Concept Logo, Animation test.
The Solution
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.
The Brief
Pride in Place is the UK government's £5.8 billion strategy to regenerate the country's most in-need neighbourhoods over the next decade — a programme large enough, and visible enough, that its brand needed to do real work: act as a mnemonic device linking visible local uplift back to the policy, and the policy back to the government delivering it. Senior stakeholders wanted the identity to evoke community, rejuvenation, and positivity at national scale. An agency was commissioned first; when their work failed to convince stakeholders, I was brought in internally to succeed where they hadn't.
Client
MHCLG
Role
Project Lead
Tenure
2024 – 2026
Discipline
Brand / Identity System
Fig.00 — Pride in Place
PIP
A neutral mark built to earn its meaning over time, commissioned after an agency's first attempt couldn't convince stakeholders.