Design | Branding | Illustration | Education | Charity | Science
Salters’ Institute Science Club Brand & Illustrations
The Salters’ Institute needed a brand, a learning platform UI, and three years of illustration content for Choose Chemistry, their online chemistry club for 11 to 14 year olds. Rather than managing multiple suppliers across those disciplines, they worked with me on all of it.
The brand came first, establishing a visual personality designed to make chemistry feel exciting to secondary school pupils. From there, I developed the gamification concept for the platform: a snaking path that pupils follow as they complete tasks within each weekly theme. Simple in principle, visually effective in practice.
The illustration challenge across 36 monthly themes was finding the right level of detail. Topics ranged from the environment and sports to emotions and art, the job was to go deep enough to feel engaging without the UI doing the teaching. That balance required a lot of conversation about what was possible, what was preferable, and what would actually land with a 12-year-old.
Each month, I supplied individual assets from the theme as PNGs for the team to use in their marketing on the website and social media, allowing the illustration style to lead the Choose Chemistry brand identity.
Last year the team returned to explore how the platform could be optimised for accessibility. We worked through the options together, adjustments to contrast, ways to give users more control over the illustration density, and improved the login screen, which had been overdue for an update. Accessibility on an illustration-heavy platform requires careful consideration of how visual richness and usability coexist, and that conversation is ongoing.
The platform is still running on that original creative foundation, with the three years’ worth of content on rotation and new themes being added periodically.
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If you’ve got a project that needs clear, human-centred design, illustration, branding or a combo of all three, I’d love to work with you.