We felt it appropriate to create a brand and identity to help visualise our concept and push it a little bit further.
Before any visual work began, we needed a name. We each came to the first session with suggestions, the early candidates leaned functional and descriptive: Alert, Relay, Signal, Notif, Pause, Break, Freeze, Lull, Halt, Finify, and combinations of these. They described what the service did, but none of them stuck.
When we regrouped after the moodboarding session, something unexpected happened. Without any prior coordination, almost everyone had independently written down Flare. It wasn't on anyone's shortlist going in, it surfaced naturally, and when it came up it immediately felt right to the whole group.
Flare works on several levels. It captures the moment of alert, something being triggered, set in motion, sent out. It suggests urgency without alarm. And it carries a second meaning that felt quietly appropriate: a flare is also something fired to signal that a person needs help. For a service designed to intervene at one of the most vulnerable moments in someone's life, that resonance felt worth keeping.
We didn't labour the decision. Sometimes the right name is just obvious, and this was one of those times.
To begin, each team member independently collated a moodboard. Rather than working from a shared brief, we wanted to see what we each naturally associated with the concept, the words, the imagery, the colours, the tone, before any group influence crept in. The thinking was that genuine overlap would be more meaningful than a consensus arrived at by committee.
When we regrouped and compared, the convergence was clearer than expected. A warm, high-energy orange appeared across almost every board independently. That consistency gave us real confidence in the colour, it hadn't been suggested by one person and agreed to by the rest, it had emerged separately, which made it feel like the right instinct rather than a compromise.
Beyond colour, the moodboards collectively pointed toward something that felt urgent but considered, not clinical or institutional, which would have been the wrong register for a service dealing with people at a vulnerable point in their lives.
With the moodboards as a shared reference point, each team member developed their own logo concepts. We agreed early that starting from a single mark, rather than a full visual system, would give us the clearest foundation to build from. If the mark was strong, everything else could branch from it.
The first round produced five directions each, drawing loosely from our individual moodboards. When we came back together, the orange had carried through into almost every iteration, which confirmed it as our primary colour. We weren't settled on a mark yet, but the palette felt decided.
A second round of development followed, this time with the orange applied and with more deliberate exploration of type. The goal was to find combinations that felt confident without being aggressive, and approachable without being soft.
