The Leap is Bradford’s ‘Creative People and Places’ Programme. An initiative funded by Arts Council England to help make more arts and culture happen within communities. With a ten year plan ahead of them, the first job was getting The Leap name established within lesser-served areas of Bradford.

Through interviews and online questionnaires, an outward facing proposition was written with the purpose of becoming a calling card to the community—encouraging people to turn their project ideas into reality, through funding and mentoring from The Leap. Two themes evolved within the proposition—‘giving people a platform to perform’ and ‘making community-led culture less elusive and more inclusive’.

‘Giving people a platform to perform’, paved the way for the core brand identity, centred around a stripped-back black and white colour palette that puts people from The Leap funded projects, centre stage, by building an identity around them.

The colourless approach put more pressure on the basic brand assets to visually amplify the messages within the proposition. An active tone of voice, tagging and photography all helped. But doing most of the work was a custom font named ‘Take The Leap’, which did just that, to become the biggest identifier for the brand—meaning brand recognition was possible within a simple 44kb file that could be easily shared and used internally at The Leap and wider project users. The font name acted as a self-reminder to what The Leap were encouraging future project applicants to do.

The ‘making community-led culture less elusive and more inclusive’ side of the proposition, allowed The Leap to talk about The Leap and the mission it was on. A series of illustrations and a brighter secondary colour palette gave The Leap the opportunity to shout about themselves with a brighter visual tone of voice. A set of both static and animated stickers were made available to decorate marketing communications alongside social media reels and stories.

The website was less, look at what we do, and more, look at what everyone else is doing, becoming a platform for community-led culture projects happening in Bradford.

To assist with rollout an online brand toolkit was embedded into the website. A one stop shop to learn about the new brand and download the identity assets.

The visuals within the case study were used to express the full potential of the brand identity concept. Not all expressions of the brand are real.