Regulations have induced a language of fear and hazard into health and safety. Brittany Golob explores how the British Safety Council rebrand makes safety accessible again

Better safe then sorry. Do not enter. Danger, stop, don’t, hazard. The signs, symbols and language of health and safety is one of fear. Do this and terrible consequences may rain down from the heavens. It is forbidding and somewhat hostile.

It is also confusing. Elephantine signs adorn construction areas documenting the ways in which protective clothing must be worn, lest death and dismemberment befalls a visitor or an employee. Pages upon pages of guidelines and regulations bombard businesses, small and large on the dos and don’ts of workplace safety.

Within that mêlée of signs, symbols and safety regulation lies the British Safety Council. Once it was the idealistic champion of health and safety that pushed the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act and seatbelt requirement into law. Now, it has become a government-regulated health and safety organisation charged with developing the standards, qualifications and certifications for the nation’s health and safety framework.rganisation.

It produces hundreds of printed guidance documents a year and provides support and services for thousands of members – from the corner garage to international logistics firms. Time had come, amid that sea of confusing, fear-mongering language, to throw off a disjointed visual identity that ineffectively communicated the Safety Council’s position and embrace a new standpoint.

The organisation, after six decades and a few different visual identities, sought an effective way to communicate with its audiences, from its member companies to political actors to internal stakeholders.

At the end of a years-long repositioning and rebranding process, the British Safety Council has come to be known by a simple, bold logo and a series of photographic and pictographic illustrations that communicate its new position of ‘helpful simplicity.’

“We used to talk about our organisation by saying ‘No one should be killed, injured or made ill by work,’” chief executive Alex Botha says. “The market was saying health and safety is very complex and what they needed from organisations like ourselves was to show them how to do things. We looked through the fog and simplified things. That’s the basis of ‘helpful simplicity.’”

“Avoid the worst, put safety first”

It wasn’t simply a matter of picking a pair of pleasant- sounding words to represent the Safety Council. The messaging was alit upon after an extensive internal

audit that served to address four central needs, Botha says. First, there was an external need for differentiation from a crowded health and safety marketplace in. Internally, the business’ confusing structure muddled stakeholders’ understanding of the Safety Council’s processes. Its communications strategy

also needed to be addressed as the 20-year-old branding failed to reflect how the Council operated. Finally, there was an inherent practical need for new branding as the existing identity was inflexible and ineffectual.

Developing the ‘helpful simplicity’ message addressed the strategic need for a new outlook on communications. Strategic creative Gilmar Wendt and designer Carina Hinze were brought in to implement that change in messaging.

At the outset, Wendt and Hinze coordinated the aforementioned research. They interviewed high level officials within the organisation, senior management and line staff and held workshops with members and the Council’s external audience.

“What’s quite interesting is health and safety is a hotly debated thing for all the wrong reasons,” Wendt says. “What we also found was that the sector wasn’t very helpful when it comes to explaining itself. Legislation is getting more complicated and there is a tendency to make things more complicated to justify their existence.”

It became clear through the research stage that distilling the wealth of legislation, guidance and regulations that govern health and safety in any number of industries into digestible information for the Safety Council’s 7,000 members required not only a repositioning but a rebranding as well. “There is a lot of complicated information that is mindboggling for the audience that has to deal with it,” Wendt says. “There’s the SME with five people in an a garage in South London that gets all this health and safety stuff when all they need are a few simple rules to get by. Then there’s the international organisation in which safety is paramount because it has the power to save people’s lives.”

“A spill, a slip, a hospital trip”

The approach to design developed from the need to make this overwhelmingly complex industry clear, tangible and comprehensible. “It needed to be a strong idea, short, simple and human,” Wendt adds.

Health and safety is notorious for atrocious branding that favours abstract patterns, eagles and other such cliché symbols of standard and authority. When creating a new logo for the British Safety Council, Wendt sought to employ the very devices of the industry itself – the hard hats and hi-vis jackets, reflecting strips and traffic cones. The logo evolved from a less-than-striking set of shields and diagonal lines to a striped box at a 45 degree angle enclosing the wordmark.

“Often when you work on brand identity you have to face the question, ‘How does it belong to that sector and stand out at the same time?’ You find that there is a sector language that you have to transcend,” Wendt says. He and Hinze transformed that language of primary colours and construction sites into something creative, simple and, most importantly, inherently evocative of health and safety. Hinze adds, “Using very simple illustrations and introducing a bit of wit and a bit of humour plus introducing the 45 degree angle, there was a very strong and iconic look and feel.”

Once the logo was developed, it was a mere hop, skip and jump to the rest of the branding – which features a collection of clever pictographs and expressive photographs. The process, Wendt says, “was an exploration of how you can bring those two things together and visualise that the British Safety Council sits right in the middle of it.”

The team also incorporated the use of photography into the Safety Council’s communications and marketing material, commissioning photographer Nick Daly to create a photo library. Whereas before, the image library was sourced from a variety of places, photographers and subjects, the new branding invoked a consistent tone. Guidelines were introduced to address the use of photography, allowing images to

be integrated into the library in future, allowing they conform to the branding style.

Hinze’s illustrations turn bold, tricoloured icons into communications devices for allowing the British Safety Council to tackle complex messages in a constricted space. The actual branding was only half the battle for the Safety Council as Hinze was also responsible for addressing the nearly 600 different documents the Council publishes on a yearly basis.

“When the goalposts are shifting, we influence where they go”

To incorporate the branding into the Council’s digital and printed products, Hinze spent about four months camping out in the Safety Council’s design offices. She worked with everyone from the marketing team through to senior management presenting and answering questions about the brand while simultaneously learning how the Council produces its communications. Hinze says, “It was easier for me to be in-house so people could see me and ask questions. With the amount of publications they produce, I needed to create a template that addresses how these documents can work in an easily approachable system.”

The design duo was aware that the rebrand had to be more than simply an exercise in visual identity, but a practical, useable solution. Hinze’s in-house stint allowed her first-hand knowledge of what the Council required from its printed materials. From there, she was able to develop a template within which to use the new branding.

“When the world thinks it’s about legislation, we know it’s about people”

While a revamped visual identity, set of brand guidelines and template for published material involved the creation of new collateral, the rebrand

also involved a curtailing of superfluous activity. “The rebrand hasn’t only been about packaging our

products and services for new audiences, but it has forced us to ask what our audiences want,” Botha says. “We’ve taken away certain things. The whole idea of ‘helpful simplicity’ is focusing on the things that are helpful and simple. It’s simple but not simplistic. The core idea helped us cut through the crap and focus on key issues.”

From the multitude of audiences the Council is responsible for addressing, the designers whittled down the communications material to serve 22 core audiences. This helped create clarity within the business, Hinze says. The Council’s internal audience was well served by the rebrand as employees were forced to reevaluate who their audiences were and what they required of the Council.

For the Council’s 7,000 members and external audience, the rebrand has simplified the way health and safety is communicated. “It’s a test for a successful positioning that it would work for all the different audiences,” Wendt says. “From small and medium enterprises to global companies with 50,000 employees or more to the UK government. Simplicity as a principle of how to do things will apply to all of them, it will just mean different things.” Gone are the fear-inducing threats of non-compliance or disaster. Gone are the complexities of layer upon layer of regulation, legislation and guidance. Here to stay are the bold graphics and simply communicated messaging that makes health and safety accessible to all.

“What was clear was at the end of the day, people want to have something pragmatic,” Wendt says. “While the sector, for a number of years has been presenting itself through threats. Now, people want to comply but they don’t know how. That is a shift in the sector.”

Botha adds, “With a complex set of stakeholders and set of messages, what you need is a brand that is quite flexible and can give you the flexibility and versatility to operate across all that. But it needs to be coherent and consistent. In developing the core idea of ‘helpful simplicity’ we were developing the core brand in conjunction with our new strategy. That without a doubt makes the end product a lot stronger than what it was before.”

The days of fear-mongering and confusion have been dealt away as the British Safety Council welcomes in a new era of personable, clear and effective communications to better serve its interests in health and safety. No longer is it ‘better to be safe then sorry’, but better to simply address safety first.

Peer review

Aidan Brennan, creative leader at The Team

For a long time, health and safety communications have taken a conservative approach. Any organisation with a reputation to maintain must be seen to be serious about their commitment to their workforce, customers and visitors; on the constant look out for an individual’s personal safety; as well as adhering to best practice. The result: safety communications tend to fall into two camps – one functional, the other fearful. Functional “tells it how it is” with a straightforward no-nonsense delivery and fearful does the opposite – pricking consciences with emotive messages.

How refreshing it was to see the British Safety Council rebrand.In the safety sector, icons and simple messaging are an expected graphic language. But I was pleasantly surprised to see attention-grabbing poster designs featuring decapitated and severed pictograms accompanied by quirky retro rhymes. “A spill, a slip, a hospital trip” and “To avoid a scene, keep your workplace clean,” recall public safety phrases of the 1950s. Some might argue they make light of the seriousness of health and safety, but if they are engaging and memorable, then they’re more likely to be effective.

Meanwhile, the logo’s simplicity and neatness cleverly convey sseveral meanings. The safety chevrons are a well recognised shorthand motif for the sector that demand attention. Their cropping and assembly suggest a grouping or network, and the two colours, almost intersecting, hint at collaboration. The wordmark in bold caps lends integrity and gravitas. All in all it’s a mark that has authority and openness – not an easy trick to pull off!