This year we’ve celebrated FutureGov turning 10.
At the end of 2017, we faced the creative challenge of how to represent and celebrate our tenth birthday through our FutureGov branding. FutureGov 10 (FG10) was a great opportunity to revisit our brand assets as we started to plan events, communications and merchandise for 2018.
After 10 years, our brand identity has become recognisable and well known across the public sector. Our visual assets are a key part of how we spread the word about our work, making sure we’re seen and represented at events. And importantly, it makes us visible when working inside organisations across the public sector (our core work).
At the start of 2018, we launched a full brand identity refresh, built on FutureGov’s existing identity and assets. Over the course of the year, the work has proven a great success. So, as we reach our eleventh birthday in 2019, it’s a great chance to look back and celebrate the work produced by our creative team throughout the year.
I’ve had the privilege of art directing and providing direction for this work, but full credit for the creative development and visual design work belongs to Chris Evans and Jas Soh from our design team. They did an outstanding job of developing concepts and producing final brand assets in under three weeks (alongside an existing schedule of busy project work).
Brand mark, fireworks, colours and typography
The creative brief was to focus on celebration. With this in mind, we had to continue to be bold, while introducing fun, celebratory elements.
The FutureGov ‘FG’ brand mark has been used extensively over the past few years, so we made the decision to update this to an FG10 brandmark.
For those interested in the detail of the final ‘FG10’ design, Jas custom drew the ‘0’ in ‘10’ to better match the ‘G’ in ‘FG’ — creating a better balance and overall effect.
The main application we explored was to introduce what we described as ‘firework’ effects, applied to the brand mark and as graphics for our website, banners and other types of media. To support this, we extended the colour schemes, using bright, bold colours to complement the existing brand.
In terms of typography, the existing FutureGov brand uses Futura and Proxima Nova. We decided to explore introducing a new typeface to help set apart the new designs we were creating. We settled on Museo Slab. This slab serif was chosen to provide contrast to the two sans-serif typefaces that have represented the FutureGov brand for the past 10 years. It was then used specifically on things like pull up banners and print advertising throughout the FG10 campaign.
The FG10 brand identity in application
We produce a lot of pin badges and stickers at FutureGov. Everyone loves a badge and sticker, so they travel with us to most events and workshops around the country and the world.
For FG10 we produced a range of circular stickers and pin badges with the updated brand mark, using colour variations from the full expanded colour palette and varied sizes. A treatment for the sticker designs that worked particularly well was a version with are ‘FutureGov’ logo used as a repeated pattern in the background.
We developed these designs further throughout the year. My personal favourite is the rainbow version commissioned before London Pride. Chris tweaked the colours slightly to tie in perfectly with our FG10 brand pallet, and we were very pleased with the result.
Limited edition special foil (silver) badges were produced for the FutureGov team with ‘FutureGov is 10 Est. 2008’ as an ident.
We also produced some custom cut FG10 pin ‘3D’ style badges that proved to be popular with the team.
The branding was then used in lots of other places. We produced pull up banners for the sponsorship of events like LocalGovCamp and a branded notebook using a ‘FutureGov is 10 stamp’.
The final part of any brand identity change is to update all the day to day assets we use like presentation, speaking and sales templates. These were all redesigned and updated for use in Keynote and Google Slides.
Finally, we refreshed our website and social media presence with the new brand assets, supported by new messaging.
Uscreates joins FutureGov
For the announcement of Uscreates joining FutureGov, we worked with a freelance designer to develop a motif against both company logos, incorporating both brand colours in the design. We used this alongside FG10 materials to make the company announcements back in October. This worked really nicely with the idea that the two companies were greater than the sum of their individual parts — represented by an ‘X’ motif (‘X’ also representing ten).
Moving into 2019
Brands and visual identities always evolve and FutureGov is no different. For the obvious reasons of turning 11 in January, we’ll be moving away from our FG10 branding. As we step into our second decade, we’re starting to think about how we evolve the FutureGov brand identity again, which means we’re already looking ahead and planning for 2019. Watch this space!
We’re hiring ambitious and creative designers who want to make a difference in public services. Find out how you can join the fun.
Designing FG10 was originally published in FutureGov on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.