Designing positive change: delivering a full rebrand & website for ND+

Designing positive change: delivering a full rebrand & website for ND+

Ah, the end of a year and the beginning of a new one. The time to slow down, take a breath, and spend four months pushing an all-hands-on-deck project, which also happens to be one of your biggest and most exciting to date. Wait, is this the right script?

Yep, 2026 has got off to a busy start here at Roots! We’ve spent the last few months working on a significant rebrand for ND+, a local not-for-profit, with a particularly packed-out final month as we completed a huge new website ready for the launch.

Now, when we say ‘significant’, we mean it. In total, over four months, we built one website, designed three logos, developed 19 email signatures and created more marketing collateral than we care to count. We did, however, count up the number of Asana tasks we completed (the only metric that truly matters), and currently it stands at 178. You can do the maths.

Now, the site is live, the press release is out there, and the project is finally finished. And while it’s been a busy one, we couldn’t be happier with how it all turned out! Here’s exactly what went down.

What is ND+?

If you’re a business owner in North Devon or Torridge, like us, you may know ND+ by a different name. Until this rebrand, the organisation was called North Devon+. A not-for-profit organisation dedicated primarily to supporting local business owners and farmers throughout the region, they’ve done a lot of good work. In fact, prior to them being a client, we benefitted from their Business BOOST scheme.

Alongside business support, ND+ provide project and grant management services to local authorities and charities, and deliver long-term economic development in North Devon and Torridge. It’s a large, multi-faceted organisation, all of which we needed to keep in mind to develop a brand that’d encompass multiple audiences.

Why did ND+ rebrand?

Rebrands happen for all kinds of reasons. We should know, we wrote the blog on it. For ND+ specifically, a lot of it the drive to rebrand came down to how the brand was perceived and positioned, and how this was holding them back in achieving their goal – which is to help people and drive economic growth. While ND+ has always done incredible work, the old brand didn’t properly showcase this – or the breadth of what the organisation actually had to offer.

Plus, while ND+ is firmly rooted in Torridge and North Devon, its reach extends throughout the wider South West. This is important, because it directly enables ND+ to support more business owners, and provide local organisations with better opportunities – and importantly, connections. The need to reflect this was one of the primary drivers for changing the brand name.

The logo

It was crucial for the new logo to be fresh, clear, and a world away from the typical offerings you expect from council-adjacent projects – which lean a bit dated in style, muted in colour, and often aren’t versatile enough for the digital and physical display requirements of modern brands – while still being government-friendly.

Once we’d nailed down a preferred style, we continued working on colour gradients before deciding on a vibrant mix of purple, pink, yellow, and just a hint of blue. Here in North Devon, colour palettes of blues and greens are often used, so we deliberately went in a different direction to ensure the ND+ was bold and distinctive.

Brand rollout

An important aspect of the branding process for us is imposition. As we move through the initial logo concepts, we create mock-ups so that the client can see the proposed concepts in situ.

Then, once we’d signed everything off and created the brand guidelines, we moved into creating actual collateral. This was a full rebrand, so absolutely everything needed updating. Specifically, we worked on email footers, a digital form for funding applicants, a pull-up banner for events, letterheads, social media profile images and headers, business cards, a MailChimp template, and a presentation template.

The website

Once the brand identity was complete, it was time to move onto the website. Needing to convey information for all of its target audiences, on each of its core offerings, this was always going to be a big site, and it took a lot of time and close collaboration with the client to nail down what this would look like.

As the site required so much content, we decided what was essential for Phase 1 of the project, and what could wait until Phase 2 (which is actually what we’re working on now!). For this particular site we were creating all of the copy, so we started with tone of voice development, crafting a few key messages to guide the rest of the content.

We worked on the content and wireframing simultaneously before progressing onto design. From here, we worked on styling key pages first, getting feedback from the ND+ team before rolling out to the rest of the pages. This meant that we could stagger the build, beginning the development for approved pages while design continued for other site pages.

The website needed to go live on the 29th January, so after Christmas, it was all guns blazing on ND+ to make the deadline. Shout out to our web developer, Tye, who spent a full month on this project alone.

Marketing

The rebrand was a good opportunity to revisit the marketing of ND+ in general, so we completed the project with a marketing strategy. Within the strategy, we explored the positioning of ND+, the audiences they were targeting, content pillars across different mediums, and tone of voice and style across the various platforms. This included an analysis of current marketing efforts and social media performance, alongside recommendations across a few different mediums.

While we’re still working on a few aspects of Phase 2, which mainly incorporates website content, this has been a hefty – and extremely satisfying – project. We’re super happy with the work we’ve completed so far, and we’re really excited to see how the rebrand supports ND+ in getting the message out about the awesome work they do.

Is it time to look at your own brand, website or marketing? Get in touch, we’d be happy to help you. And if you’re a North Devon business owner looking to achieve goals of a non-marketing nature in 2026, contact ND+. We know first hand how impactful their support can be.