Creating an Inclusive Brand: The Design Behind the Inclusive Sport and Culture Festival (ISCF)

Introduction

Creating the initial branding for the Inclusive Sport and Culture Festival (ISCF) was an opportunity we were incredibly excited to receive. At Purple Goat Agency, we create work that drives positive change for the disabled community and raises the standard for inclusive marketing. With over 50% of our team having lived experience of disability, that perspective directly shapes how we approach strategy, creativity, and accessibility in everything we do.

I am Luke Trower, Design Manager at Purple Goat Agency, and I led the development of the visual identity and brand guidelines for the Festival’s initial branding. In this article, I’ll walk you through my design process.

The ISCF Logo

Branding Process

A large portion of branding work must be completed before Photoshop and Illustrator are opened. Without this groundwork, there is no clear direction for what needs to be created.

Initial discussions with the UK Sport Team showed that they wanted a vibrant, dynamic brand that celebrates inclusive sport and culture. This approach can feel like walking a tightrope, as you need to balance positivity without becoming patronising. Our strategy team crafted a tone of voice that suited this, focusing on words such as “authentic” and “empowering” to achieve this.

From here, I had all the information I needed to get started. When fielding concepts, I explored ways in which sport and culture can be harmonised. In my early Art education, I learnt about the importance of line. Line plays a foundational role across many disciplines. I explored how this translated into sport and culture, drawing parallels between track lines and sheet music. I worked this into early logo and poster mockups which the UK Sport Team responded to positively. This gave us a clear direction and motif.

Colour was another key element for this brand. I assigned each of the four sports a colour that best suited them, selecting a cohesive and vibrant palette to reinforce the Festival’s overall tone and direction. This would also help us to establish sub-brands for the individual sports.

My approach to Inclusive Design is one of Multimodality - the idea that no single solution can be accessible to 100% of people, so we instead create a range of solutions to suit individual needs. The Disabled community was going to be a primary audience of this brand, and I knew that some of the concepts that best suited this brand could be at odds with the needs of certain groups.

In inclusive graphic design, I believe nothing should ever be completely off the table. Strict criteria, such as WCAG 2.2, work well for web design because they are built for backlit screens and websites are created by rigid, objective coding languages. The history of Art and Design is very different to this, and if applied rigidly to graphic design, this kind of guidance could result in many brands looking the same.

However, I also believe that there is strong merit for designers in looking at guidelines such as these, and there are valuable lessons for graphic designers within them. A website that utilises these well is the National Autistic Society’s page. Their branding can be quite bright with strong colours, but one thing that I like about their website is they have a ‘calm’ button that desaturates the colours. This is the kind of design approach I value. It is colourful and stands out in moderation, maintaining the flair of art, but for those who have different requirements there is an alternative option so nobody is excluded.

I identified a similar challenge in my branding. Like the National Autistic Society, I made sure to include desaturated versions of all colours so alternatives could be worked in for audiences who might find the bright colours overwhelming. Flat colour options were created separately from gradient versions. I also made monochrome versions of the logo so they could be used where needed. This meant that the bright, positive tonality of the brand could be preserved while alternatives could also be applied where necessary.

Another area I paid close attention to was the line motif, particularly for the logo. I was aware that the font used would make the acronym less readable. However, to me, a logo is an illustrative, pictorial element that distinguishes a brand, not something that necessarily needs to be read. For larger variations of the logo, I put the name to the side in a highly-legible typeface ensuring key information remained legible. For smaller variations, I thought about the context of a logo. It will not be used in isolation and will be surrounded by readable text that makes the important information highly legible.

Conclusion

Overall, we believe that this was a particularly strong brand concept. As a team at Purple Goat, we created a brand that balances inclusivity with energy and dynamism. We aimed to put alternatives in where necessary to enhance the accessibility of the brand where possible.

Personally, I cannot wait to see the Festival develop and look forward to seeing how all the branding we created looks in a real world setting.

You can find out more about Purple Goat here https://www.purplegoatagency.com/