UK Young Academy
Launching a new initiative by the Royal Society and six partner academies
Project overview
The UK Young Academy is an exciting new initiative from the Royal Society, working in partnership with six other academies from across the UK and Ireland. The Academy gives a voice to those early in their career, who are passionate about societal change. Being in its infancy, the organisation needed a platform to help them reach potential members – emerging leaders who have already made significant contributions in their field.
We are proud to have led on this project, from developing the UK Young Academy’s brand, to designing and creating their first website.
Features
- Development of a bold new brand
- Dynamic menu transitions
- Custom brand animations
- A flexible editing experience
0.25g
C02 per homepage view
100%
Lighthouse Accessibility score
1.2s
Page load time
It was a huge pleasure to work with the team on the UK Young Academy website, taking their vision through our full brand process. The end result is a brand expression that is energetic, innovative, collaborative and modern. Celebrated across the organisation, the new website is already attracting members – beginning the first chapter in an incredible story.
Developing a bold new brand
To develop the brand of this new organisation, we needed to work with all stakeholders, which, as well as the Royal Society, also included the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Academy, the Learned Society of Wales, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
To help us understand what the UK Young Academy should be, and who its members will be, we surveyed all stakeholders, and then presented them with a brand survey insights presentation, ahead of our in-person discovery workshop.
Defining the audience
Following the presentation, we held a hybrid discovery workshop at Somerset House, with stakeholders joining both in person and digitally.
During this interactive session, we shared our thoughts and questions to ensure we had a good understanding of the new brand, and defined user personas accordingly.
A bold brand identity
Before finalising the new brand identity, we shared several options with all stakeholders, and, following feedback, we produced a brand identity deck, before fine-tuning our work to create the UK Young Academy’s brand guidelines.
Bringing the brand to life
Alongside the development of the physical branding for the UK Young Academy, including their business stationery, we also created the wireframes for the new website.
Our focus for the website was on creating a dynamic design that would appeal to the wide ranging audience the organisation wanted attract.
Strong menu transitions highlight the ease of navigation throughout the site.
We also developed subtle custom animations that appear on scroll, to delight, making the website an inviting online experience for all who visit.
We were delighted with Wholegrain’s approach to our work. Communication throughout the project was excellent and they were very easy to work with. We are very pleased with the final result.
