Listening to Giants: Brand & Website Development for EWI

We love animals here at Roots. Just ask our office dogs, resident sausage Cicero and spaniel Sasha. So, as you can probably imagine, when we were contacted by a new animal welfare charity requiring a brand identity and website to launch with, the whole team was excited.

For good reason too: this ended up being one of our favourite branding and website projects of the year, and it still holds pride of place in our portfolio. So in this blog, we’re shouting about all things Elephant Welfare International. Keep reading to find out the process we used, see the awesome designs we created, and how you can support a very special charity!

Meet Elephant Welfare International

Elephant Welfare International (EWI) is a new charity set up by an academic team from the University of Nottingham. Led by Dr Lisa Yon, who has studied elephants for more than 30 years, EWI creates academic tools designed to improve the lives of elephants in captivity. They do this by offering tools to first measure the welfare of the elephants, as well as providing education and resources to help caregivers improve their elephants’ wellbeing.

While EWI has been conducting research and creating academic tools for more than 10 years, in 2024 they officially became a non-profit organisation. They’re currently fundraising to further develop their Elephant Welfare App and keep it free to access for anyone working with elephants, alongside their academic research.

As any charity knows, having a digital platform early on is essential. It’s how you share your story, connect with supporters, and help others understand why your mission matters. EWI didn’t just require a website though; they needed a logo, and a supporting brand identity.

Logo & Brand Identity

Before we started work, we did some research into comparable wildlife charities, getting a better idea of the market so that we could create something that felt familiar and credible to new audiences, whilst being distinct enough to set EWI apart.

We knew we wanted to shorten the brand name to EWI, ensuring the logo would be easy to read, easy to remember, and would work well on a range of assets: digital, physical, and in a wide range of sizes and dimensions.

We decided on a clean, minimalistic and modern logo that placed the elephants front and centre. It’s a monocolour logo, usually applied in neutral shades of grey, black, white, or green. For the elephant imagery we wanted something eye-catching, but not too playful or cartoonish as the charity is at its core an academic project, underpinned by science and in-depth research.

The brand colours are natural earth tones: deep green, grey and brown, with minimal contrast. We picked shades often associated with conservation, connecting visually with EWI's work. We wanted an authoritative, academic feel for the brand, and knew a lot of scientific content would need to be distilled here and made digestible, so we chose neutral typography with fonts that were easy to read and follow.

Anyone who’s read the Roots blog before (or has worked with us on a branding project) knows how we feel about brand imposition. It’s a crucial part of the branding process, allowing the client to see the new brand in situ across a wide variety of different assets, and to assess its versatility.

In 2026, digital assets are more important than ever, but ensuring your logo works in print is absolutely vital if you want to guarantee consistency and cohesion, prevent frustrating print challenges, and ensure that the new brand has longevity. This is also why working with human designers for your logo is more important than ever, despite the rise of generative AI (but that’s a topic for another blog).

For the imposition process this time around, we created mock-ups for business cards, stationary and leaflets.

Copywriting & Tone of Voice

EWI’s team consists of scientists and academics: brilliantly clever people who have devoted their lives to animals. However, any scientist will tell you that when you know all of the technical details, it can be hard to distil the information and make it legible and engaging for a layperson. With that in mind, we supported EWI in developing a tone of voice for the brand, creating some key messages, and producing copy for the eventual website.

The copy required a very precise balance. We needed to make it authoritative, credible, and rooted in science, academic and fact. We also needed it to be engaging and emotive enough to resonate with readers and attract donations. One of the ways that we did this was through creating ‘adcepts’ showcasing key messages for the brands: Every Elephant Matters, From Research to Reality, The Science of Happiness, Listening to Giants – all of which would eventually feature as headings on the website.

Website Design & Development

The next part of the project was the website, which would bring together all of the hard work we’d put into the brand, visually, verbally, and narratively. This would be a multipurpose site. One of its core functions would be to facilitate donations, attract volunteers, and encourage fundraising enquiries, so it required functionality for monetary donations, as well as space to share the mission and story.

The site also needed to host information about the Elephant Welfare App – a behavioural assessment tool that all captive elephant caregivers could request access to for free to measure the welfare of their elephants. EWI has created and contributed to extensive research, many papers of which needed to be referenced and stored on the new website. In the future, EWI also wanted the ability to create more accessible resources for donors and others interested in the cause.

We created a simple, informational website, beautifully designed using the new brand. We integrated donation functionality, specifically choosing something that wouldn’t charge high costs (an essential for new charities).

We used a combination of stock photography and film as well as photos and footage from Lisa’s many years of studying elephants in the field. Projects where we get to browse folders full of animal photography are always welcome, by the way.

Overall, this was an awesome project for us to work on. We created something that we’re genuinely proud of, worked closely with some great people, and the project had the extra bonus of doing a bit of good in the world. We weren’t the only ones who were happy with it either – thanks a lot for the amazing review, Lisa!

If you’re looking for a charity to support, we highly recommend EWI. An estimated 20,000 elephants live in captivity around the world, the conditions of which can often be poor. EWI offers caregivers a measurable way to understand the wellbeing of their elephants. With the data gathered in the process, they create important welfare guidelines to improve elephant care – all while advocating to improve conditions and standards for elephants in captivity. Their work makes a meaningful difference to the lives of some of the greatest creatures on earth, and we can help them do more of it.

A big thank you to Lisa and the rest of the EWI team for trusting us with this project. If you want help with your own brand, content or website, we’d love to help. Get in touch!