Accessibility-First Brand Evolution

750 words (Approximately a 4 minute read)

The Outcome: Scaling Empathy

How do you scale warmth? That was the core question for Aura, a family-run direct cremation service. They had a compassionate team, but their brand visuals were creating coldness and confusion just when users needed clarity most.

By rebuilding their brand identity with an “Accessibility-First” philosophy, I transformed their digital presence from a barrier into a bridge. The result was a unified system that didn’t just look better—it measurably improved readability for their 60+ demographic and empowered their internal team to produce consistent, high-quality assets without designer intervention.

The Problem: A Brand Fighting Its Audience

Aura’s core demographic is people aged 60-85. This group faces specific digital challenges: visual impairment, anxiety around technology, and a need for high-contrast clarity.

The existing brand was actively fighting these needs:

• Typography conflicts: A legacy print font was creating poor readability on screens.
• Inaccessible colors: Low-contrast pairings were failing WCAG standards, alienating users with visual impairments.
• Operational bloat: The internal team struggled to match print and digital assets, leading to a fragmented customer experience.

The goal wasn’t just a “refresh”—it was to remove the friction between the service and the people who needed it.

The Solution: Warmth Through Rigour

I approached the rebrand as an engineering problem as much as a design one. Every aesthetic choice had to pass a strict functional test: Does this make the service easier to use?

1. Typography as a Trust Signal

I moved the brand from Akzidenz Grotesk to Rubik. This wasn’t a stylistic whim; it was a functional upgrade. The previous typeface combination of Akzidenz Grotesk and Darker Grotesk had historical roots in print, and its inconsistent, offset apertures created a crowded, claustrophobic feel on digital screens.

Why Rubik?

• Warmth and professionalism: It has slightly rounded edges that provide the “warmth” the previous clinical font lacked, while remaining more modern than humanist styles.
• Accessibility: A higher x-height improves readability, which is critical for the target audience.
• Open counters: The design opens up the letters, reducing visual clutter.

Why not Open Sans? I considered Open Sans, but it felt slightly too rounded and generic, edging closer to competitors’ visual language. Rubik provided a better balance between unique character and professional clarity, without the complex licensing costs of other modern geometric sans-serifs.

2. Accessibility by Default

Accessibility often gets treated as a compliance checklist. I made it the creative constraint.

The “Orange” Problem Orange presents significant accessibility challenges when paired with white and black. Achieving WCAG 2.1 AA contrast ratios requires careful calibration and often forces compromises. Rather than fighting this, I embraced it.

• The Shift: I engineered a restricted color system where every valid combination is WCAG 2.1 AA compliant.
• The Palette: We limited the scheme to Amber (warm accent), Blue (action/links), and Stone (neutral backgrounds).
• Operational Win: The marketing team can now combine any primary color with any text color from the system and know it will pass accessibility standards. No guesswork. No “design police” needed.

3. Design Principles

To ensure the system remained robust long after I handed it over, I established five fundamental principles:

1. Do not obscure images: Clarity over style.
2. Do not compromise text: Language is the engine of the brand.
3. Less is more: Every element must earn its place.
4. Colour has limits: Don’t rely on colour alone to convey meaning (a key accessibility requirement).
5. Let things breathe: Avoid cramping elements together; use whitespace to reduce cognitive load.

4. A Self-Serve Illustration System

The brand needed to feel human, but custom illustration is expensive and slow to produce. I created a scalable library of SVG assets with built-in logic:

• Responsive Detail:
  • Small (up to 64px): Simplified to 1pt strokes for clarity.
  • Medium (256px): 2pt strokes with added detail.
  • Large (512px+): 8pt strokes with complex gradients for hero sections.
• Result: The team can drag-and-drop assets that look bespoke but behave like robust software components.

The Business Impact

The rebrand delivered more than just a new coat of paint. It became an operating system for the company’s growth.

• Unified Customer Journey: Whether a customer picks up a brochure or visits the website, the visual language is identical, building subconscious trust.
• Speed to Market: The clear guidelines and templates reduced the time-to-publish for new marketing materials.
• Risk Reduction: By baking accessibility into the core tokens, the legal and reputational risk of non-compliance was effectively automated away.

---

Great design doesn’t just look good; it clears the path for the user. In this case, it ensured that technology never stood in the way of compassion.