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We have been working with the Royal Society of Biology since the beginning of 2024, initially to design and develop their new website and then to refresh their identity and develop assets to support their communications with young people, members, professional biologists and the wider world.
In our first meeting with their executive team we presented an initial direction that retained their existing logo but suggested a new website structure that related to the concepts of discovery, development, decision making and society, and used free-floating images of the natural world to emphasise the life that is at the centre of biology. But we emphasised the importance of co-design and our desire to listen and learn from the team and their members as part of an on-going and mutually beneficial relationship - a fundamental characteristic of flourishing ecosystems and of flourishing human societies.
The team were impressed by our thoughtful approach and asked us to look at their identity as it also needed to be updated.
Our initial discovery workshop asked the team to share their hopes and concerns for the future of RSB’s identity and strategy, review what was important or challenging about their existing identity and suggest a potential design direction to initiate a deeper conversation about future direction.
Our discovery research had identified a number of design insights, and we used this workshop to share these through visually led futures.
The first related to colour and suggested that the blue and green of the existing logo did not necessarily reflect all of life. We referenced "Nature’s palette, A colour reference system from the natural world", which was first published in 1814, highlighting that the underlying colours of living things included greens, yellows, orange, red, brown, purple and violet. True blue colours or pigment are rare in nature and most plants and animals use light to appear blue. This led to a new colour palette that aimed to represent their whole of life rather than a specific life form.
We also built on these colours and the diversity of life to suggest a possible image direction which included this diversity of colours and built on the wonder of life and the beauty of life’s patterns at every scale.
A second key change was to suggest that the Royal Society’s name did not need a single logo to represent its diversity and that we could utilise a range of natural images and colours to bring the society to life.
We used Noto typeface in Sans and Serif form to capture both the modern nature of biological research and the deep tradition that informs the life sciences - from the earliest humans who passed on knowledge about plants and animals to the more recent coherent field that arose in the 19th century.
This combination of colour, font and image created a diversity of visual representations that showed the society how it could present itself to a wide range of audiences.
The executive team and in-house designers and editors were really pleased with this direction and this enabled us to work collaboratively to refine the colour palette, image library and identity touch-points so that the new direction could be shared with the trustees, who represent a range of the Society's membership and provide honest feedback on how the identity supports them and the wider life science community. This led to the final identity design which you can browse through below:
This included the development of a new strategy, detailed designs of the identity across multiple touch-points, an icon set together with design directions for animations, sub identities and other contexts.
The imagery included examples across ‘Scales of life’, ‘Biologists at work’, ‘Cutouts from life’ and ‘Living collages’.
RSB’s animation direction builds on scales, people and cut-outs to create a visual world that is diverse, full of life and play. Inspired by artists like Céline Baumann, who used cut-outs to create Parliament of Plants, it engages audiences in a multi-sensory and tactile experience. This helps communicate complex ideas in accessible ways without sacrificing depth, showcases the diversity of life allowing us to transition between different scales and perspectives, and fosters scientific curiosity by encouraging audiences to discover, develop and even decide on the direction of their own lives.
In parallel with the development of the identity, we undertook a review of the RSB’s website and held a number of co-design meetings with the editor, in-house designer and developer. This included a review of RSB’s audiences, its goals and purpose, an analysis of the information architecture and a proposed site map direction, development of key wireframes and a visual design direction that builds on the overall identity.
We are now in the process of building all of the components needed to complete the development of the website and look forward to its launch this autumn.
If you are interested in using design to engage with your audiences, transform your strategy and communications and engage with global challenges, please do get in touch.
