Leadership Skills Foundation


The challenge.

If you want to change the game, you have to change yourself. That’s what we learnt from rebranding the charity that used to be called Sports Leaders. The purpose of the organisation is to empower young people to become leaders in their field. Making the organisation relevant again involved understanding the needs and wants of multiple stakeholders, including government organisations, partners within education, and community leaders. Keeping everyone on board, while creating an entirely new brand, name and all, was a challenge, but one we’re delighted to have taken on.

The insight.

Our remit was to identify and articulate the organisation’s unique proposition; to create a completely new brand identity – including a new name for the organisation; and develop the toolkit needed to embed the new brand across the organisation. Through customer research, internal feedback, competitor analysis and stakeholder workshops we gathered the insights and knowledge needed to completely revise the brand and help define the organisation’s core proposition.

The creative.

A completely new brand, and a clear, future-looking proposition that confidently articulates the organisation’s role in the world.

We brought the entire brand architecture to life with a new logo and visual identity and story that resonates throughout the team. This is their ‘brand compass’ – helping guide growth and opportunity.

Foundations of the identity

The identity needed to reflect the values and personality of the brand and speak to their vision. Themes of stepping up, moving forward and transformation were at the heart of the visual identity, where the three words of the new name formed literal steps.

Dynamic and flexible

From this solid starting point, a dynamic and flexible visual system of shapes and lines was developed, providing the internal team with a wide suite of options to create visuals and graphics, combined with a bright and bold colour palette. Always moving up and always moving forward.

Brand toolkit

We designed a comprehensive brand toolkit that offered clear guidance on how best to use the identity. The visual system allows the internal team to adjust the ‘volume’ up and down on the graphic complexity. A toolkit of parts that enables quick-and-easy on-brand graphics to be made, all the way up to visually dynamic illustrations where multiple assets are brought together.

What they say

“Working with Cite enabled us to achieve a long-held ambition to significantly rebrand a well-established 40 year old charity.”

Our new identity has been a huge step forward in better representing our long-term strategy. Cite worked with us to carefully balance our need to remain relevant to our existing stakeholders with our desire to work with more organisations in new sectors and reach more people. Our new identity already feels like it has been embedded with us for years and we’re excited by how it will drive our evolution over the next 40 years..

Richard Norman, Chief Executive, Leadership Skills Foundation

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