What is Accessibility?
Developing a brand identity that is fitting to the consumer is key in creating a successful brand.
Through workshops and active research, identifying colour combinations and typography that stays clear and comprehensive for a wide range of impairments becomes the initial building blocks for an effective identity.
We created this short video for our pitch to Derwen College.
Practice What We Preach
At COUNTRY we practice what we preach, it’s the best way for us to show you we really know what we’re talking about.
As you go through this site, we have focused attention on making sure that it is accessible to everyone through its design. Our colour combinations reach a AAA and AA standard, while our fonts and spacing ensure clarity for anyone going through.
We understand these pitches can be long, this is another reason for us to make sure everything is as clear as it possibly can be.
Our Strategic Process
1. Getting personal
We spend quality time getting to know you. Through workshops and interviews, we get to grips with what you want from your brand.
2. Meeting the students
Market research is crucial to our process. We reach out to parents and carers, as well as students where possible, to get feedback on your current brand. We want to find the spark of what drew your current students and expand upon that.
3. Get to know your potential students
What are the alternatives to your service? Why might an individual be drawn to those services instead of yours? We take a look at what other services provide and perhaps what they lack, and help guide you to your place in the market.
4. Personality development
This is the fun bit. We’ve learned all about what you, the parents and carers, board members, staff, and maybe most importantly, the students want. Now it’s time to get creative. We get to work on developing the personality of your brand and the imagery to best represent it.
Our Services
Strategy
- Workshops
- Brand Positioning
- Mission and Values
Brand Identity
- Visual identity – Logo, colours, typography
- Brand Guidelines
Website design and development
- Website Design
- WordPress CMS
Branding Process
Projects such as these are initiated through workshops and interviews; working with stakeholders such as your teachers and TA’s, charity workers and it’s funders, but more importantly understanding the response throughout this project from your students and their families. These are all centred around collaboration and co-creation, ensuring that what we create responds to your needs of creating a truly accessible brand identity.
Workshop will be run with two structures, depending on those attending. Activities will be set to identify how employees at your educational service relate to the brand with alternate ones to engage students in ensuring the development of the new brand identity fits with representing your work and environment. While interviews will be focused towards parents to understand what draws them to trusting your service with helping their children to reach the next step in developing their futures.
Using the values, as set in the brief, and the descriptions of your educational service we can develop a basis for our questions and what directions to take the activities in to best understand how we can develop your educational service into a living, breathing brand, representative of the work and opportunity it presents. Through these workshops and interviews we can then begin to understand the best implementation of how we can introduce more warmth and humanity into the brand; fundamentally developing an understanding of your personality and values and finding how best to bring these through in the brand’s identity.
Website Design
Alongside creating a new identity, we are able to develop a new accessibility focused website. Using colour palettes and fonts developed for and carried throughout the brand family architecture, combined with UX workshops we will be able to identify the best framework to create a website that best functions for your educational service’s core demographics.
By incorporating everything developed for the brand architecture, we can look at how to incorporate this in representing all aspects of the educational service you provide.
Booking systems and navigation will be a key element in ensuring we can deliver a website of a WCAG AAA standard, where applicable.
We have particular experience in e-commerce and booking systems as seen in our chosen case studies.
The following integrations and services come as standard:
- Booking system
- Ecommerce system
- Yoast SEO plugin
- Analytics
- Mailchimp Integration
- Document downloads (prospectus).
- Payment gateway
- Secure parent/carer pages – Password or user account managed
Why Country?
Our Approach
Our core focus has always been, and continues to be, human-centric. In our rapidly expanding digital age, injecting a living, human element into brands is more important than ever. To succeed in this competitive and cluttered space, brands need to be multifaceted; to have good days and bad days, serious sides and silly sides, to be highbrow as well as light-hearted. Just like people, we believe that brands that are born and evolve in this way are disproportionately successful.
Therefore, alongside our proven methodology, Country have developed a unique approach that focuses on putting personality and humanity at the centre of the design process. This allows us to create brands that people can relate to, fall in love with and want to invite into their lives.
To achieve this outcome, we harness the most powerful tool of any business; the people. We gather information from clients, creatives and stakeholders to capture the essence of a brand and identify how we can ensure it resonates – both engagingly and sustainably.
We call this Personality Led Design, and we have already deployed it successfully with a number of local authority clients and projects.
By entering into close, collaborative relationships with our clients, we foster a shared understanding and ownership of their key business challenges, working together to achieve the ultimate goal of solving the commercial challenge that exists.
Part of this approach involves opening up the design process to be fully transparent; we demystify what goes on inside our design studio, pull down the metaphorical curtain and share it with our partners, inviting clients to participate, think and design alongside us.
Alongside design aspects, our strong, dedicated strategy team will help to uncover valuable insights and identify new opportunities for connecting with your audience more authentically.
Our Specialist Experience
The Hive
Rebrand, Printed Collateral, Signage
Based in the heart of Shrewsbury, The Hive has been helping give a voice to vulnerable children and young people across Shropshire, Telford, and Wrekin for the last eleven years.
As both a charity and a venue, The Hive had a unique challenge of finding a clear identity and voice, that’s when we were invited in to help.
Severndale Specialist Academy
Rebrand
Severndale is one of the largest special education centres in the country. Working with other schools based in Shropshire, Severndale ensure a breadth of opportunity to offer education to children and young people aged 2-19, with a wide range of learning difficulties and disabilities.
This project also holds a personal regard to Founder Warran Brindle, who for the last 3 years has held a position as Parent Governor as his youngest daughter attends the school.
Hope House Children’s Hospice
Rebrand, Video, Website Design & Development
Hope House is a palliative care centre whose main mission is to ensure every family facing the death of a child doesn’t have to experience it alone, making sure they receive the care and support when they need it.
Derwen College
Branding, Website Design, Marketing.
Derwen College was established in 1927 by Dame Agnes Hunt. Her aim was to teach physically disabled children and adults to become wholly self-supporting.
Working with varying commercial sides of Derwen, and what is to become “Derwen High Street”, student’s are given the opportunity to develop industry level vocational skills. These are then matched by on-site accommodation, adding development of social skills and independence, continuing to fulfil Agnes Hunt’s dream of helping them become self-sufficient.
We’ve been working with Derwen to simplify their brand family as well as develop a best in class accessible website. This will not only help their brands turn more of a profit, but also increase awareness. Throughout this process, we’re working with Derwen’s community at all levels, from students to stakeholders, everyone’s opinion is helping us develop the best accessible design possible.
Testimonials
“Ultimately, we were looking to create a brand that our local community; participants, customers, audiences, clients and project partners, could relate to. DBC Studio really encouraged this approach and helped to facilitate discussion around our new brand and the future of The Hive.”
Katie Jennings – CEO of The Hive
“Design by Country have brought a completely fresh perspective to our marketing efforts and helped us to engage more consistently and authentically with our audiences. As well as improving our branding, web presence and corporate positioning, they’ve enabled us to not only connect with communities – but to educate and inspire them to take action.”
Mark Barrow – Director of place Shropshire Council
Arrange a free brand consultation
Prefer to talk to us?
Abbott's House, Courtyard,
Shrewsbury
SY1 1UW