This blog post is a bit unusual, in that it’s not about the Three Rings system itself. Instead, it’s here as a big “thank you” to the graphic designer responsible for the new Three Rings logo which we first introduced on October the 27th. In fact, the logo had been waiting in the wings for a while – we offered a sneak preview of it at our Three Rings Roadshow last summer, as a final “test run” to gauge opinion.
We’d discussed changing the logo for a while (as we said when we launched our new look, the old “red phone” image was starting to put off organisations that could really benefit from Three Rings just because they didn’t run helplines!), and so in February we started to look seriously at updating our corporate image. We started the search for a professional graphics designer, and we were very fortunate in finding Philip English, who was extremely generous in giving his time and expertise.
Philip was willing to design our logo on a pro bono basis (a great relief when you consider that all our income comes directly from charities and voluntary organisations!), and he asked very intelligent questions to find out what sort of image we wanted Three Rings to have, exactly what we did, and a rough idea of what our objectives were as a company.
From that brief (which felt vague even to us, since we mostly just knew what we didn’t want the logo to look like!), Philip produced three designs for our consideration. Each suggested design was eye-catching and unique, and expressed a different facet of what Three Rings means. To make the decision easier, Philip offered his own thoughts on the different logos, describing what they expressed to him, and some of the logic behind the design (the dark ‘Three Rings blue’ of the old design made vibrant by a deep and complimentary yellow in one design; a rougher “sketched”-looking logo offset by a warm orange strapline in another).
In the end, of course, we picked the new “concentric rings” logo, which suggested timeslots filled out on a rota and, brilliantly, expresses the core values of the Three Rings project in a single clean and accessible image. Once we’d made that choice, Philip gave us a high-resolution, scalable copy of the logo, which you’ll have seen on last year’s Christmas cards, and on your Three Rings mugs! We’ve even used the launch of the new logo to give the appearance of Three Rings itself a much-needed refresh, when we launched Milestone: Neodymium back in January.
What we do want to say is that, in addition to clearly knowing his stuff, Philip was very friendly and patient with us while we made our decision. The process of rebranding the whole of Three Rings and rebuilding the website from scratch was a lot of work on top of our day jobs and our regular volunteering to develop Three Rings (and for other organisations!). It would have been a much, much harder task to without Philip’s skill and hard work, which is why we wanted to thank him publicly here, and offer a direct link to his website: philipenglish.biz.