We were thrilled when BKR invited us to pitch for their full rebrand and website redesign. A top tier accountancy association with global reach but with a very dated brand and old, clunky website. The scope for bringing the business up to date was enormous. The pitch process was gruelling, with several rounds of proposals, but being able to execute both the re-brand and build the web portal in-house, swung the decision our way. 

The Design Phases

We began by bringing BKR’s senior leadership to our Marlborough studio to guide them through our brand development process.

Discover – Learning all there is to know about BKR and their members through research, interviews, questionnaires and a morning of workshops with the senior leadership team

Define – Taking everything we learnt and distilling into the brand story for BKR, defining their reason for being and role in the world

Design – using the brand story as a jumping off point for the design development of the new logo, look and feel

Deliver – consolidating this into a brand guideline document.

We knew from the Discovery stage that the name would stay, so this shaped our thinking from the start. BKR’s Brand Idea centred on the concept: the Expansive Power of Community. At its core, we redefined the acronym into three key pillars: Business, Knowledge, Relationships. This “power of three” inspired our design team to create a flexible visual device called the ascenders. These three graphic pillars appear throughout the refreshed brand as a recognisable and consistent visual mark. A bold new colour palette, modern typography, and in-house photography completed the visual transformation. Now, BKR is confidently positioned to embrace the next phase of its growth.

The Website

The website rebuild presented a range of challenges; most importantly, it needed to deliver the revised brand message to a wide spread of stakeholders. Additionally, the website was a channel through which members would communicate; sharing knowledge and building relationships. With these requirements in mind, we set out to understand the task from the ground up, focusing on data sets and processes.  This enabled us to model behaviour in a highly visual way before committing to a direction in terms of design and development.   Throughout the web process we collaborated routinely with the senior leadership to create agile and meaningful feedback loops. We ensured that the rebuild was transparent and met requirements at every step. The project had a firm deadline to launch the new brand and website at the annual Washington DC conference.

Silverless delivered both aspects of the project on time and on budget. This project perfectly reflects what Silverless does best. We use our in-house skills to build and grow brands from the ground up. Strategy, graphic design, web design and build, photography and film, coming together under one roof. The result is a complete brand experience for both BKR members and internal stakeholders. You can see the new website here.