The Brief
UKSA, the UK Sailing Association, was founded in 1987 to provide disadvantaged young people with the opportunity to experience and benefit from maritime activities and sailing – a purpose it fulfils to this day by offering a suite of on-the-water educational experiences for school and group trips.
Over the years, UKSA has become a world-leading provider of maritime training, offering dozens of courses across yachting, engineering, water sports, FE maritime programmes, and apprenticeships.
Borne was brought on board to go through a strategic sprint to refine UKSA’s positioning, and give it a new identity that was both ownable and distinctive: a foundation to talk about the incredible work it does to inspire young people, particularly in a category that’s filled with elitism stigmas, but with direction and focus – not just ‘splashing around in a dinghy’.
The Solution
The central idea behind the new positioning was ‘Boundless Discovery’.
It gave UKSA a platform to demonstrate its leadership in the careers space: this is about fulfilling the potential that’s present in and around the sea, waiting to be discovered – but needing more people to do so.
It was born from all the opportunities that ‘the sea’ represents, from renewable energy to supply chains and from defence to leisure.
This positioning gave us a clear focus and direction that informed the creative brief.
The Creative
Taking inspiration from the maritime world we were able to create an identity that represents the boundless, radiant growth, training and development UKSA has to offer – and is instilled in its organisation.
Logo
The refreshed logo combines UKSA’s history and foundations in sailing – and takes inspiration from modern radar technology that uses similar shapes to pinpoint locations. By retaining the existing word mark, the modernised font combined with the sail in the A’s negative space gave us a distinctive new logo that provides flexibility and standout in application.
Type
The typefaces were stripped back to include a primary modern, hardworking font for headlines and body copy, Stolzl, in which the geometric characters replicate the radial elements within the identity. The secondary font, Tiffin, inspired by the traditional serif fonts found within nautical maps, provides standout within captions, subheadings, and CTAs.
Colours
The colour palette is derived from nautical colours but with modern variations to differentiate from what’s typically seen within the category; paired with fresh and energetic accent colours to enhance engagement and accessibility. The introduction of tints provided a way to retain the core palette but apply it in ways that bring energy to the schools and youth group-orientated audiences and collateral.
Photography
For the art direction, we expanded on the human centric photography that was already part of the existing identity and introduced boundless landscapes and textures to add new pillars in line with the positioning – providing flexibility to break up content and demonstrate both opportunity and expertise, without elitism.
Finally, we introduced graphic assets to complete the identity. The radial map grid as well as the compass were an evolution of an existing angular brand asset and simply zoomed out to signal growth and opportunity, mimicking tools used in careers in and around the sea.
This allowed us to place focus on people, copy and texture – while also serving as a grid. The grid can be filled with colour in places to again add vibrancy for more youthful audiences; combined with a journey route often seen in maps to emphasise the trajectory from discovery to opportunity.
