Since our foundation, Pathway has been at the forefront of positive change, growing our impact as an organisation and helping to build and define the field of inclusion health in the NHS. Our partnership with Crisis in 2021 (still an independent charity but now part of the Crisis group) and the development of our new strategy for 2024-29 marked a new chapter for us, and was the right time to refresh and renew our brand and web site.
What you see before you now is the result of this work. We hope our redesigned website now better reflects our current priorities, and our new visual identity captures something of our warmth and compassion, as well as clearly communicating our years of expertise and evidence-based practice. The re-design process has been a chance to reflect on our history and make sure in terms of presentation that we’re in a strong position to keep on pushing for the transformative changes that we all want to see in health and care provision for people on the margins.
Laying the foundations
With strong recommendations from several of our partners we selected charity communication specialists Let’s Dance to help us. At the start of their process they took us right back to our core values. As the pillars that underpin our mission and vision – to improve the health and wellbeing of people experiencing homelessness and other deeply excluded groups – we needed to ensure that our values guided thinking about the renewed brand, and that the design development would fit with our strategic aims.
Through a series of workshops and consultations, we looked back at our history and explored our hopes for the future. Let’s Dance used these discussions of Pathway’s core values to guide their design thinking and development of the brand – compassionate, rational, dependable, collaborative, and committed. These values help to inform how we communicate through words and they also played a key role in developing the new design look and feel.
Pathway has built an incredible body of evidence, research and good practice, working with our colleagues in the Faculty of Homeless and Inclusion Health and beyond. We are delighted to offer this through our new website, making it easier for clinicians and decision makers at national and local level to draw on this to improve the health of the most excluded people in our country.
Dee O’Connell, Director of Policy & Programmes
Rethinking and revamping our visual identity
Beginning with updating our logo, we needed to move on from the perhaps narrower presentation of homelessness the previous version presented. Instead of focusing mainly on the idea of people living on the street (the boot prints in our previous logo), we wanted to expand from that intentionally ‘gritty’ feel towards something that could encompass a wider cross-section of people’s lived experience.
Our new logo incorporates our name alongside a simple mark based on the idea of non-linear pathways, reflecting our experience that journeys through the health system for people experiencing homelessness and other forms of social exclusion are rarely simple or straightforward, and yet – crucially, with help and support – can be successfully navigated and result in positive outcomes. Alongside this, we also updated our Faculty logo to be in keeping with this new look and feel.
Let’s Dance constructed a visual language inspired by the logo mark and brought in soft shapes to reflect our balance of kindness and competence. The typography was carefully reconsidered to strike a more professional tone, while a colour palette was proposed to convey friendliness without compromising on the serious nature of our work. We want all of our communication materials – ranging from in-depth research studies through to training materials for frontline staff – to reflect our enduring optimism and the belief that things can always improve.
The new website was all about getting organised, with content that’s easy to navigate. We have a vast library of useful resources – these needed to be easy to find with the ability to sort and browse by category.
Jonathan Lucas, Communications Officer
Making our website accessible and user-centric
When it came to designing and redeveloping our website, one of our primary aims was to make it more user-friendly and simpler to find your way around. Working with Let’s Dance, we’ve improved how our content is organised and presented across all areas, including The Faculty for Homeless and Inclusion Health, our Partnership Programme, and our database for Research, Policy and Practice, where resources are now categorised by themes to ensure quick and efficient navigation.
We also recognised the need to tell our own story and communicate our purpose to the broader public, as well as offering tools, information and support for our partners in the health service. We wanted to showcase how collaboration can make a real difference; to inspire visitors to our web site to have trust and confidence in our work. We incorporated personal stories to bring a human face to clinical outcomes, and demonstrated our real-world impact by backing these stories up with data, statistics and evidence.
Recognising the power that photography has to shape perceptions, we also shifted our approach to imagery, choosing photos that humanise subjects and convey the optimism of proper care. We’re also making an ongoing effort to represent diverse narratives from within our community and avoid stereotypical portrayals of people experiencing homelessness.
A strong commitment to accessibility was key throughout the entire development process – we wanted to ensure our website remains as inclusive as possible. By meeting WCAG AA guidelines, we’re taking steps to guarantee that everyone can access the wealth of information we offer.
Through this work, it was crucial the changes we made inspired trust and confidence in our staff, our partners and our partnership teams. We recognised the need to establish a clear and consistent voice, communicate all the ways in which we can help, and illustrate the entire breadth and depth of what we do.
Alex Bax, Chief Executive
Looking to the future
We’re confident the changes we’ve made continue to reflect who we are, and our drive towards a society where socially excluded, homeless and vulnerable people find equity in all health and care services they receive. We hope it’s clear just how much care and attention has gone into making sure it’s the best we can make it!.
This refresh hasn’t simply been about aesthetics; it’s an illustration of our commitment to keep making change happen and ensuring everyone has access to the high quality care that should be everyone’s right. We’ve repositioned and reorganised ourselves to be better equipped to continue making a positive impact on the colleagues and institutions we support and the lives we touch. We hope you’ll join us on this exciting journey as we continue to work towards a more compassionate, equitable and inclusive future!