Shift

A 560-acre innovation park set in east London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Shift is here to find creative answers to the major challenges of city life: climate change, wellbeing and social justice. Our challenge was to create a name, brand and website that gave life to the organisation and place.

As a dynamic, living testbed, it brings together local residents and global organisations, world leading academic institutions, established businesses and start-ups. It also houses several creative clusters and a growing science and tech community. Shift enables innovators to trial their ideas on-site, prove they work and roll them out at scale.

To get a clear understanding of this unique offer and sense of place, we ran a variety of consultation sessions from the start. These involved naming and creative workshops, engaging with multiple, complex stakeholder groups and distilling all of their voices and views. This was vital to the project’s success, especially as people are at the heart of Shift’s vision for change.

Part of that process was to find an inspiring name that set the tone for the entire organisation. The name Shift was settled on due to its sense of action and immediacy, with a verbal narrative crafted around it.

Our bold visual solution, together with the logotype, gave life to this story. The logo’s letters derive from a graphic system that’s based on a square digital grid. These forms can break off and link up in different ways to create strong and recognisable patterns/compositions. They help to convey ideas around collaboration and innovation in a confident, simple way. The patterns can also be applied using combinations of colour and/or hold images. This gives Shift’s brand plenty of flexibility. Warm and vibrant colours work beautifully as a set across the different applications, platforms and website.