New Work: Oscar Phillips Foundation

We were recently approached by the Oscar Phillips Foundation to design an identity and build a website in time for a BBC News piece that featured the charity and the challenges they face in preventing rail suicides across the UK.

Named after Oscar Phillips, a promising and popular 16 year old who sadly took his own life at a railway station in 2015, the Oscar Phillips Foundation is a charity that goes into schools and not only educates young people about emotional wellbeing, but also gives motivational, uplifting assemblies at the most stressful parts of the school year – making sure that every young person feels free to speak their mind, be it to their parents, teachers, friends, anyone that makes the stress of being a teenager in modern Britain that bit more manageable.

Using Oscar’s favourite colour, we have created an identity treads a careful line – being both vibrant and full of personality (the bowtie marque, the distinctive lowercase letter ‘i’s in the primary chosen typeface), but also credible and respectful. The latter was crucial to respect Oscar’s memory and treat the subject of youth suicide with the sensitivity it deserves.

Supported with a straightforward website that was live in good time for the BBC News coverage going out, the overall impression that our identity creates is one of a charity that has been around for much longer than two years – which was the exact intention. Though the Foundation has only been around since 2015, the issues that they deal with have been prevalent forever – and supporting mental wellbeing is an issue near and dear to our hearts at BGN.