Anthony Nolan
A new digital brand and design system to reposition a leading health charity's focus towards their cutting-edge research.
Anthony Nolan, a pioneering charity, has connected individuals with life-threatening blood cancer and blood disorders to stem cell donors for 50 years, giving four people a second chance of life every day. The charity’s new focus on groundbreaking research in cell and gene therapy aims to transform more patients' lives. This evolution prompted a brand refresh to better resonate with key target audiences and more accurately represent the charity's emphasis on innovative research.
Challenge
Anthony Nolan’s mission had changed as its focus had evolved and the scope of its work had widened. This rendered the previous brand outdated. The charity's website no longer aligned with this new approach or engaged desired audiences effectively. Having established a brand strategy and vision, Anthony Nolan sought assistance in developing this new brand identity and applying it to the website. Having undergone a major website transformation in 2021, the goal was a fresh design without another costly rebuild. To deliver this we created design concepts, new page templates, and digital style guides for in-house application, with a fast, 6-week turnaround to accommodate the charity’s upcoming campaigns.
Approach
The new brand positions Anthony Nolan as more than a stem cell register by emphasising their research into unlocking the treatments of the future.
Our designers took this vision and worked collaboratively to develop and apply it to the website designs. We looked at layout principles, typography, information hierarchy, accessibility, interaction, motion principles and image treatments to develop concepts that brought this new brand to life.
We quickly established a close and highly collaborative working relationship to meet the project’s tight deadlines. Rapid concept development early in the project let us get valuable input quickly and apply it to the page and component designs.
To help smooth the implementation we created a detailed Figma component library. We also provided guidance on the rules and best practices developed through the design process, to allow Anthony Nolan’s digital team to manage the new brand with confidence going forward.
The resulting brand application creates a vibrant and engaging site that successfully positions Anthony Nolan as a science-led research organisation. The use of bright, vibrant colours creates a modern, bold, and optimistic feel, reflecting the charity’s focus on being the solution.
Digital Brand
The new brand, which had been developed initially in an offline context, provided a colour palette and graphical devices to apply to the website. To translate this into a digital medium, we realised we could utilise the brand’s key graphical device as a feature of the layout, baking the brand directly into the structure of the site.
The coloured ‘cells’ of varying sizes developed for the new brand are inspired by DNA sequencing, which uses a series of blocks of colour to represent the order of the nucleotides along a stretch of DNA that has been sequenced.
We took this graphical device and applied it to creating a bento box layout for the site, which is an in-vogue style of website layout that uses a grid of tiles of varying sizes. The style of the boxes of the bento grid is derived from the brand’s ‘cell’ graphical device. This means that the site’s layout is the graphical device, weaving this element of the brand into every page. It’s a unique approach that creates an outstanding website. By leveraging this nod to DNA sequencing it connects with the research that the new brand was intended to highlight.
To apply this across the site we developed and evolved several new components to provide a flexible system that could be used in a wide range of contexts. We also developed a motion language for the site, making it feel more dynamic and modern, to appeal to the intended target audiences. The new design works perfectly on mobile devices, a must, given the younger demographic being targeted.
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"We chose to work with Numiko to rebrand our website because of their wealth of experience in the charity and science sectors. We needed a partner who really understood what we were trying to achieve with a brand that united people and science to improve outcomes for patients and a new strategy that seeks to make a significant impact. The Numiko team worked at real pace and listened to our needs throughout the development phase, delivering a powerful new look for our brand in the digital space that brings our new positioning to life. The site works particularly well on mobile which is important for our audiences, and we’ve had great feedback so far. "