Branding project for local charity PACE

Now, 15 years later PACE runs a number of projects including:

• PACE Advice - Enquire, the debt advice centre.

• PACE Camp, an annual non-residential summer camp for kids over two weeks during the summer holiday.

• PACE Counselling, a BACP registered counselling service that helps people work through life issues they are dealing with.

• PACE Food Bank, that connects with local agencies and gives out hundreds of comprehensive food parcels to families and individuals in need of help.

• PACE Money Skills - On Track, a tried and tested course that helps people get better at handling their money.

• PACE Family & Life, which runs parenting and marriage courses to help equip people in these major aspects of life.

• PACE Youth, working with young people to provide a safe space each week to hang out with their friends alongside monthly specials featuring fun and educational activities.

Our Approach

With a wide spectrum of projects and variety of different people within the community that PACE serves, it was recognised by the PACE trustees that many people who accessed a particular project, were unaware of the other provisions that PACE provides as each project did not necessarily incorporate the PACE name.

This disconnection between the different PACE projects also affected the charity’s ability to raise awareness and funding, since members of the community did not understand the relationship between PACE and its various projects.

It was decided that the PACE brand needed to be consolidated across the projects by incorporating the PACE name and logo within each. Each PACE project logo had to work in isolation but also retain a very obvious link to PACE as a whole.

Working with the trustees, we developed a simple wordmark, drawing on the existing colour palette of the old PACE logo, and creating a system that allows the primary logo wordmark to work with the names of each of the projects. The projects were renamed to incorporate the PACE name in each as follows:

• Camp Supreme > PACE Camp
• Enquire > PACE Advice - Enquire
• Access Counselling > PACE Counselling
• On Track > PACE Money Skills
• Operation Agape > PACE Food Bank
• Life Courses > PACE Family & Life
• PACE Youth (was already called the same).

The main PACE logo incorporates a tagline that we developed, which succinctly sums up all that PACE is about: ‘Here for you’.

The word PACE is all in lowercase to give a sense of informality and access. The word is filled by differently coloured intersecting circles which is a nod to the old logo that featured five colours representing the charity’s mandate to meet the needs of community in five core areas: mental, physical, spiritual, emotional and social.

The tagline uses an informal handwritten typeface with a warm dark brown to contrast the bright colours of PACE. The use of uppercase characters with a slight incline and exclamation mark gives it an active and friendly enthusiastic statement of intent.

The new PACE logo and its outworking across each of the projects has had the helpful effect of consolidating the charity’s brand, making it more identifiable regardless of the project and raising greater awareness of the charity as a whole.