Digital First Brand for IHREC
IHREC | Digital-first brand system for Ireland’s national human rights institution
We developed a cohesive brand system to reposition IHREC, Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission as a digital-first entity. The resulting system is adaptable, distinct, and meets high accessibility standards.
To combat brand drift and foster a clear, unified identity, we partnered with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission to transform their digital communications, enhancing accessibility, simplifying their brand system, and ensuring a cohesive identity across platforms. Discover how we built a system that puts accessibility first.
The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) monitor, advocate and report on human rights issues in Ireland, accounting directly to the Oireachtas. Throughout recent years they experienced brand drift, marked by inconsistencies in their identity, lack of clarity, challenges in digital workflow adaptation, and unmet accessibility standards. We set out to create a unified approach to digital communications and ensure consistency across all platforms. The updated brand system had to meet high accessibility standards. To achieve this, we collaborated with InterAccess, an expert accessibility consultancy, to rigorously review and test all brand elements and outputs.
Developing an accessible system
After an audit of the existing brand system, we identified key areas that required crucial improvements. Early on, it became clear that the brand system needed to serve as a foundation for delivering universally accessible content and maintaining the highest levels of accessibility compliance as an ongoing publishing standard.
Our first task was to simplify the logo icon to better work with fewer colours and at smaller scales while retaining the visual metaphor of interlinked people. To retain brand equity from the original colour scheme, we introduced a colour gradient based on the original palette, updated for a more vibrant display in a digital context.
Typographic consistency and imagery solutions
Over the IHREC’s history they had accumulated a large number of conflicting typographic approaches across their communication remit. We simplified the typographic system, allowing for greater consistency across their large editorial output, with consistent typographic styling across publications and internal documents.
A unified brand system
The resulting brand system unified the organisation's communications across print and digital platforms, while allowing for flexible, dynamic and confident brand expression. The system was built with accessibility at its core, to best serve the IHREC’s communications team as well as their diverse audiences.
