An update on our brand journey

The National Centre for Computing Education is going through an exciting period of change as it enters the next phase of national support for computing education in England.

In support of this new chapter, our Marketing Team has been working to evolve our brand to create a cohesive identity that works alongside improvements to the user journey.

We thought it might be interesting to share a bit of the background on how the changes we’ve developed are going and a timeline for how we will share these with you.

What we’ve been doing

We started the process by deciding on our priorities and criteria for brand development. These included creating synergy and evolution across the National Centre for Computing Education offer for our users, visual impact and championing digital accessibility and inclusive design.

Once we started the process, we worked with a designer to draw up some initial ideas and themes which unite our different programmes. This allowed us to drill down into what we wanted, for example, using design elements and colours easily identifiable as computing.

A critical element was ensuring that any changes reflected our ongoing commitment to meet the highest standards of digital accessibility through both online and offline channels. We were fortunate to have some highly skilled people in our team to support the project, including our UX/UI designer, who has been integral to the process.

We ran some user testing to make informed choices about our next steps. We had four rounds of testing during development, which gave us some invaluable insight along the way. The first was with a group of secondary students who we asked to compare the current National Centre for Computing Education logo with our initial design concepts to gauge their response to the changes. We repeated this process with a second group of teachers on one of our courses. Both groups were optimistic about the proposed changes and offered constructive feedback, enabling us to adapt to what we discovered as we scoped the different elements and user needs.

The next rounds of user testing allowed us to move the branding on at pace. At this stage, we asked members of the public to compare the logo on different coloured backgrounds and to comment on the colour palette and our proposed brand family. This feedback allowed us to reflect on and improve the brand further, specifically adapting the colours when applied on a white background.

A big thank you to those who took part at each stage of our user testing as this has enabled us to confidently drive forward a result that has exceeded our original expectations.

What’s next?

You may notice changes as we start transitioning our branding across our programmes in the coming months. This will be integrated with a phased approach, starting on our websites and becoming increasingly prominent as our offer evolves.

We’re excited to share this update and look forward to you joining us in this next chapter as we grow and evolve.

About the author

Nicola Chapman, Senior Marketing and Communications Lead, STEM Learning