2024 heralded Studio Bifrost, re-labelling itself as a purpose-led organisation. It is not surprising that many of my top 10 pieces of visual inspiration are associated with charities and good causes. That hasn’t been intentional. Maybe it’s the result of subconsciously feeling more engaged with purpose-driven campaigns because that is what I’m passionate about, or perhaps it’s because there have just been several charities rebranding with excellent results. I think it’s a bit of both, mainly because the two “not traditional graphic design / not graphic design at all” projects are created to raise awareness of important causes.

As in previous years, the top ten is in no particular order of preference and is based on when I saw the designs chronologically throughout the year.

1: Lego new visual identity

For a brand as well-loved and recognised as Lego, you would think they would have had a more cohesive visual identity, but with such a wide variety of ranges and brand partnerships, it is something they very much needed.

Lego spent two years working with Interbrand, who plundered Lego’s archives for inspiration. Comic books have influenced the results, acknowledging that Lego’s youngest fans are too young to read and evoking nostalgia in their older fans. (As an older fan, I am feeling that nostalgia!).

The design system is really clever. Much like the famous bricks, panels allow the designer to ‘build’ a layout, offering flexibility while maintaining a recognisable identity. The illustrations and bold colours add to that energetic, fun, learn-through-play feel.

Astonishingly, Lego has never had its own specially designed typeface, but that has changed. LA-based foundry Colophon was chosen to create LEGO Typewell, a geometric sans serif typeface with angled details.

In the months since this visual identity was launched, it has been a joy to see the new identity on packaging on the high street. One visit to John Lewis’ LEGO department shows how successful this new look is. Gone is the ‘noise’ of the old, inconsistent look; the latest style feels more precise and impactful.

What can we learn from this? Good visual branding is about far more than a good logo; your brand can never be too big or too old to consider it.

2: RSPCA rebrand

It has been 50 years since their last rebrand, so it’s hardly surprising that RSCPA’s octagonal logo is recognisable but no longer resonates with the public. While the organisation are the originals in animal welfare, having led the way for 200 years, their outdated visual identity made them appear “cold and authoritarian”, according to Ellen Moriarty, design director at Jones Knowles Ritchie, who were commissioned to handle the rebrand.

JKR’s new look has taken the octagon from the old mark, used it differently in the logo, and additionally used it as a graphic device elsewhere in the identity. This has freed the logo but maintained a link to the charity’s history and retained brand recognition.

The brand colour palette has been refreshed from the sombre blue to include more colour and energy and work better in digital outputs. The animal illustrations are simple and graphic but have a flowing quality. JKR commissioned Studio Drama to create the bespoke font inspired by protest placards found in the brand’s archives, which echoes details in the illustrations. The new look allows plenty of flexibility and grabs attention, yet is soft and approachable.

JKR's inclusion and adaptation of the iconic octagon in the RSPCA’s new identity is an excellent lesson in maintaining recognisable design elements without being overly wedded to the past.

3: Barnardo’s rebrand

Like the RSCPA, Barnardo’s are a household name in the UK with a long history, having been established 150 years ago. While it hadn’t been nearly as long since their last rebrand (10 years ago), they had a big problem with public perception. Research showed that many adults thought Barnardo’s work was limited to children’s homes, and half of children and young people didn’t know who they were or how they could support them.

The Clearing worked with children across the UK, asking them to express what they’ve been going through and how they feel with paints, pens and coloured paper. The children were also asked to draw the first letter of their name. From this material, The Clearing created typographic variation and details across the logo and visual identity. Each letter expresses a different emotion, some positive and some negative. Paired with a strong, authoritative, condensed sans serif typeface, this gives an impactful look inspired by children and their experiences. The colour palette is vibrant and vivacious, maintaining brand recognition through dark green with bright contrasting hues. The cut-out feeling illustrations and details are simultaneously playful and attention-grabbing.

From this rebrand, we can learn not to be afraid to try something different when generating ideas. Asking children to draw pictures and letters may not be relevant to every brand or organisation, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for innovative, appropriate ways to produce ideas other than designing in Adobe Creative Suite. Step away from the technology!

4: Coffee Foundation new identity

Coffee Foundation is a non-profit organisation committed to helping break the stigma of mental illness and raising awareness of mental health, using coffee to make connections.

Creative Director Andrea Flemma and her team were commissioned to produce the Coffee Foundation’s logo and brand identity. The “call us crazy” strapline is so on-point. Even a quarter of the way into the 21st century, how many people still feel that someone who is struggling with their mental health is “crazy”? Yet mental health issues affect one in four people every year, and the clear link between mental and physical health is becoming documented.

I love the logo. The character in the middle looks simultaneously like a happy face and a person and gives the impression that it can change into different emotions, like the pictures on a slot machine. To me, this demonstrates how anyone’s mental health can change at any time, be it positively through active well-being management and/or good events or negatively through a sudden negative change in circumstances and/or poor mental health management.

The reds and pinks give a warm, personal feel and contrast nicely with the blocky headline typeface and gritty monospace typeface chosen for less prominent text content. The overall style is modern and on-trend, with a brutalist-style website and fun, quirky single-width line illustrations.

The lesson from this visual identity is not to be afraid to shift your perceptions. Although pink is prominently used in this identity, it doesn’t look ‘girly’ because it is paired with intense red and very bold, almost harsh typography.

5: Air Up rebrand

I hadn’t heard of Air Up before reading about its rebrand, but it has quite an innovative product. It promises flavour through scent, so when you drink water from an Air Up bottle, your brain is tricked into perceiving flavour, enabling you to enjoy water without chemicals or additional calories. A clever product needs spot-on branding, and Mother Design was appointed to handle Air Up’s refresh and help expand its market.

Mother Design drew on the interplay between adult responsibilities and every human’s innate need for fun and freedom. This is evident in the balance of visual elements, for example, in the typefaces: a custom typeface inspired by fridge magnets for headlines contrasts with a more pared-back and sensible sans serif for body copy.

The new logo isn’t wildly different from the old one, but the subtle tweaks have created a tidier, more legible, and more visually impactful result.

What I love most about this rebrand is the colour palettes. Mother created a palette for each flavour, which is to be used with one palette per end design. All the palettes have the same number of colours, with similar variations in depth of colour and shade. This gives a cohesive look that offers variation.

Design systems with interchanging colours, like Air Up, are not new, but many brands, especially smaller ones, still do not employ them. Therefore, the lesson from this design project is to consider whether a multi-palette or flexible branding system would work for your brand.

6: Crunchyroll rebrand

This brand, while not a purpose-led organisation, is still close to my heart. My boys have gotten into anime in the last year, prompting me to subscribe to Crunchyroll so we could watch all the existing episodes of Jujitsu Kaisen (which is really good, and frankly, I’m really into anime now, too!) and move on to other series. You may not have heard of Crunchyroll unless you are a fan of anime, but their streaming service has surpassed 14 million members worldwide.

The old wordmark has been spruced up, opting for the ubiquitous rounded sans-serif style. While this part of the rebrand will hardly set the world on fire for innovation, it’s a marked improvement on their old logo's dated, blocky feel.

The limited colour palette of orange, black, white, and cream is where the excitement is. Limiting the palette to a few high-contrast colours creates a strong look similar to manga comics.

Further details include 139 anime and manga-inspired characters in Crunchyroll’s custom-designed typeface. Thanks to that limited colour palette, these have space to add excitement and variation without overloading the overall style. Collaboration with Japanese artists on new textures and patterns is evidence of the attention to detail applied to the rebrand, perfectly complementing the characters in the custom typeface.

As soon as I saw this rebrand, I adored the simplistic use of colour. This work showcases using a small colour palette to create a bold effect. In total contrast to Air Up’s rebrand, Crunchyroll’s new look says, why have an extensive branding colour palette full of colours you’ll never use when you can use fewer that pack a real punch? The use of colour in these two rebrands highlights the importance of understanding your brand, your values, and the messaging you want to communicate before working on your visual identity.

7: World Suicide Prevention Day “Missed Birthdays” art installation

World Suicide Prevention Day was marked on 10th September, so Campaign Against Living Miserably organised the “Missed Birthdays” art installation in Westfield, London, to highlight the alarming number of young people committing suicide. Every balloon represented the next birthday each young person would have had if they hadn’t taken their own life. Each of those people took their lives in the last decade, and there are nearly 7000 of them. After the three-day installation, all balloons were donated to the Children’s SCRAP project for arts and crafts use.

I only witnessed this installation online, so I can only imagine the impact of seeing it in person, but this really touched me. The sheer tragedy of so many young people taking their own lives and what must have driven them to take such a step break my heart. On top of that, there still is entirely inadequate mental health support in the UK to help prevent further deaths.

In terms of what we can learn from this visual piece – I can put my designer hat on and say this shows that a straightforward idea can be the most powerful, but I think the intention behind the installation is far more important. We all, as individuals and as a society, need to take mental health far more seriously, or we will keep tragically losing people to suicide.

8: Mozilla rebrand

Mozilla’s last rebrand was only in 2017, and I loved it. Swapping out the “ill” in Mozilla for a colon and two forward slashes was a stroke of genius. I am not sure their latest rebrand was entirely necessary, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating the quality of the work. Since this blog post is about my favourite pieces of visual inspiration from 2024, not how necessary they were, Mozilla makes the cut.

The new look brilliantly combines the radical rebrand of 2017 with the dinosaur of their 1998 logo. It feels like a progression from 2017 that acknowledges Mozilla’s origins. Critics say the digitised dinosaur in the logo looks like a flag—I don’t think this is a bad thing at all, as flags connote achievement and ownership, so I think this was intentional.

The minimal colour palette of black, white, and classic RGB green, combined with the custom-designed pixel typeface, gives the rebrand a grassroots coder feel and highlights Mozilla’s open-source code approach. Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), who developed the rebrand with Mozilla, purposely created this look to unite the global crowd of “activists, technologists, and builders.” Those stark colour contrasts undoubtedly give the look an activist feel.

This rebrand shows us that if your brand has a long history, you can mine it for inspiration and use it to flavour your modern new look without copy-pasting from the past.

9: St John Ambulance life-saving bra

Fortunately, I have never needed CPR, and I have never been in a situation that required me to administer it to someone else. According to St John Ambulance’s research, a third of British men are hesitant to perform CPR on a woman as they are worried about being accused of inappropriate contact. I can understand those concerns, but I also don’t want to lose my life because I have boobs and, therefore, might not receive CPR when I most need it.

Working with Revolt, St John Ambulance has developed the “world’s first educational bra” to tackle this problem. The design, in St John green and yellow, clearly shows what to do and where in bold, eye-catching lettering and illustration.

The ‘Bust the Taboo’ campaign, featuring Chelsea FC Women’s Captain Millie Bright, broadcaster and DJ Ashley James, broadcaster, disability activist, and content creator Lucy Edwards, and activist Sharon Gaffka, was run across JCDecaux UK’s advertising spaces, including its street furniture, which includes public-access defibrillators.

This work not only highlighted a gender healthcare gap issue but also proposed a solution to help resolve it, showing that design can save lives.

10: Kleenex rebrand and campaign

The global tissue brand Kleenex is a century old and has marked that with a rebrand by Turner Duckworth to iron out its inconsistent visual branding.

While the logo’s script lettering hasn’t changed much from Saul Bass’ famous 1961 original, it has been subtly refreshed and cleaned up. More notably, the lettering is enclosed by a tissue-inspired crown. The curves feel soft and comforting, while the crown connotes confidence and high quality.

This bold but cuddly look continues into a palette full of warm colours that complement the recognisable but refreshed Kleenex blue and custom-designed bubbly slab serif typeface, created in partnership with Alec Tear & Lewis MacDonald. Completing the new look is a suite of bold illustrations that include just the right amount of detail to get the point across while remaining engaging.

The vast majority of rebrands in the last few years have favoured simplification, often to the point of losing all personality. This commonly includes selecting simple sans-serif typefaces – which have their uses and sometimes are the right choice – but aren’t the only option.

Unfortunately, sans serifs seem to be the default for modernising a visual identity, which can mean the resulting look doesn’t stand out or appear to have a voice of its own. What I love about the Kleenex rebrand is that they’ve retained their famous script logotype and had a slab-serif custom typeface created for them – proving that it is possible to update your visual identity without the use of sans serif typefaces and you should consider all styles of typefaces. To be clear, I’m not saying never use sans serif typefaces. But if you use a sans serif typeface because it conveys the right feel for your brand values, does it have to be paired with another sans serif, or can you inject some personality with something different like a serif or a monospace?

A partnership made in heaven?

Feeling inspired? We'd love to help! We are a team of collaborators that enjoy nothing more than partnering with ambitious clients. Get in touch if you'd like to talk through your next project or get some advice.