The brief

The enquiry came through the website from the Medicine for Older Persons department at St James’s Hospital, working with Trinity College Dublin. They needed a logo for the Irish National Falls Audit.

A national clinical audit sits in an awkward place for design. It is not a hospital, not a charity and not a product. It has to look official enough that clinicians across the country take part, without looking like a brand being sold to them.

Designing for a committee

The approval was never going to be one person’s call. It went to the audit committee, which meant the design had to survive a room rather than a conversation.

That changes how you present. Instead of one idea and a rationale, you want a mark that is defensible on function: legible at the size it will appear on a report cover and in a slide footer, readable in one colour for a photocopied form, and free of anything that could be misread as endorsing a product.

The change that mattered

The committee came back with one request after review. They wanted the word “The” removed, so the mark read exactly “Irish National Falls Audit”.

That sounds trivial. It is not. Dropping a word changes the length of the wordmark, which changes its proportions against the symbol, the spacing between the lines and where the optical centre sits. It was redrawn rather than edited, so the finished mark is balanced around the name they actually use rather than looking like something with a word taken out of it.

That version came back the same week and was approved without further changes.

What was delivered

The final mark in full colour, single colour and reversed, as vector files for print and web formats for screen, so the audit team can drop it into reports, presentations, posters and data collection forms without coming back to us for a file.

Why it is here

Most of our public sector and healthcare work looks like this rather than like a rebrand: a specific team, a specific committee, a specific piece of work that needs to look credible to clinicians. The skill is in getting through the approval process without the design being sanded down to nothing on the way.