My Health Our Future: a ribbon young people can own

My Health Our Future started life as a project. It turned into a framework other people wanted, and a name with its own reputation, a year after I named and branded Knowing Works itself.

That’s a good problem, but it is a problem. A strong name with no identity behind it is easy to borrow (and easy to copy badly). So the job was to give MHOF something it could own and protect: a mark that’s recognisable, simple enough to trademark, and clearly its own.

It also had a lot of people to speak to at once:

• Young people, who the whole thing is for
• Schools and education trusts, who run it with them
• Health authorities, who act on what comes out

And it couldn’t be tied to one county. The framework travels, so the identity has to travel with it.

MHOF needed to stand up alone and still look like it belongs to Knowing Works.

The Knowing Works symbol is built from a section of a curly bracket, the mark used to group things in data. Those sweeping lines set the direction here too: a band that bends, changes course and keeps going. It sits MHOF in the same family, and it quietly reinforces the parent brand every time it’s used.

The type does the same job. The logo is set in Basic Sans, which Knowing Works already uses everywhere else.

The identity had two things to say. This belongs to young people. And what they put in goes somewhere.

So it’s a ribbon in two parts. My Health is the young people’s part. Our Future is where their input ends up. A fold joins them, and there’s an arrow at each end, so the whole thing reads as progress, not a full stop.

The first part is tilted by six degrees.

That’s a nod to six degrees of separation, the idea Frigyes Karinthy floated in 1929 and Stanley Milgram tested with his “small world experiment” in 1967. Nearly a hundred years on we’re a lot closer together than that. It’s here as a story, not a statistic: a small reminder of how connected we all are.

There are two lockups. The full name is the default. The acronym is for small spaces, and for the places where MHOF is already well known and doesn’t need spelling out.

Same ribbon, same tilt, same fold. Only the words change.

MHOF is run with other organisations, and they should feel it’s theirs too.

So the first part of the ribbon can change colour to match a partner or a theme. The second part can’t. It always stays in Knowing Works colours, which means however far the first part travels, you can still tell whose programme it is.

Some places don’t want colour. Website footers, official letters, a row of other people’s logos.

Both lockups come in a single colour for exactly that, in black or in white. The ribbon’s shape does the work on its own: the tilt, the fold and the arrows are all still there.

The young people’s part is solid magenta: 100% magenta in print, one spot ink, nothing mixed. It’s about as loud and as simple as a colour gets.

The future part is lime and purple, taken straight from the Knowing Works palette. Deep Green is the parent brand’s primary, so MHOF sits comfortably on it.

A ribbon is a useful shape to have around. The start of the path keeps its size and its angle, and the outgoing line can stretch to carry a heading, a callout or a short paragraph. It can hold an icon for signposting. It can even stop being straight and curve its way round a page.

That gives MHOF’s reports and comms a way of laying things out that’s already theirs, without reaching for the logo every time.

It’s all written up in the Knowing Works brand playbook, alongside the parent brand it grew from.