Keeping half a million rail pensions on track
Client
Railpen
Project
The Railpen Rebrand
Services
Sector
The Brief
RPMI has recently adopted a business structure that both recognises the different industries in which they operate, yet also understands the power of an overarching brand. Simplifying their name to Railpen, which has strong recognition in the market, is part of this change. With new offices about to be designed and furnished and a new overarching purpose already agreed, it feels like the right time to refresh the brand to reflect this new sense of unity and strength.
With a heritage going back 50 years, RPMI began life as the pensions office for the British Rail pension scheme in 1965. Now based across three sites in Coventry, Darlington and London they manage over £30bn in assets for 500,000 pension scheme members.
The Solution
The bulk of recognition is in their name, and to re-establish it as a singular overarching brand; we quickly gravitated to a simple, stable, wordmark—typography with a timeless, neutral, strength with a gentle nod to the rail industry. In contrast to this, the surrounding brand world evoked the sense of warmth and care uncovered during initial workshop sessions.
Keeping half a million rail pensions on track
The Brief
RPMI has recently adopted a business structure that both recognises the different industries in which they operate, yet also understands the power of an overarching brand. Simplifying their name to Railpen, which has strong recognition in the market, is part of this change. With new offices about to be designed and furnished and a new overarching purpose already agreed, it feels like the right time to refresh the brand to reflect this new sense of unity and strength.
With a heritage going back 50 years, RPMI began life as the pensions office for the British Rail pension scheme in 1965. Now based across three sites in Coventry, Darlington and London they manage over £30bn in assets for 500,000 pension scheme members.
RPMI has recently adopted a business structure that both recognises the different industries in which they operate, yet also understands the power of an overarching brand. Simplifying their name to Railpen, which has strong recognition in the market, is part of this change. With new offices about to be designed and furnished and a new overarching purpose already agreed, it feels like the right time to refresh the brand to reflect this new sense of unity and strength.
The bulk of recognition is in their name, and to re-establish it as a singular overarching brand; we quickly gravitated to a simple, stable, wordmark—typography with a timeless, neutral, strength with a gentle nod to the rail industry. In contrast to this, the surrounding brand world evoked the sense of warmth and care uncovered during initial workshop sessions.
A fixed point
Although we explored symbols and letter marks during the initial phases, there was a fairly pragmatic desire to put the power of the Railpen name front and centre. Of course the name, and their sector focus, meant that there needed to be some reference to rail, but even this needed to be restrained so as not to detract from the name itself. We enclosed the wordmark in simple rails to frame the word mark and provide a box-like solidity to the logo.
An ever changing world
In contrast to the dependable, constant stability of the wordmark, we wanted a visual way to depict an ever changing world. Markets rising and falling, fluctuations in values as a reaction to national and global events. This brand could have very quickly become cold and corporate, with hard edged clinical data visualisations used as graphic elements. Being aware of this allowed us to craft a warmer, softer, more granular depiction of data. Used in conjunction with imagery it evoked a warm, secure mood that fell somewhere between ‘cosy corporate’ and ‘future nostalgia’.
