London Youth Gateway is a multi-service organisation providing support to 18-25 year-olds facing homelessness. New Horizon Youth Centre, Depaul UK, Shelter, Stonewall Housing, akt, Galop, and Praxis work in partnership under the LYG banner, with the aim of eradicating youth homelessness. We created a modern, vibrant visual identity for London Youth Gateway, including a new responsive logo.

The logo design for London Youth Gateway centres around bold geometric shapes, which spell out the initials: LYG. We created the lettering for the initials ‘LYG’ ourselves, and paired it with a simple sans serif font for ‘London Youth Gateway.’ Purple features heavily in the brand identity, with accents of warm yellow, deep dusky pink, lavender and jade green.

Rich purple is the predominant colour in the branding kit, followed by warm pink, pastel lavender, bold jade and mustard yellow. Each of these colours have soft counterparts, which can be used for hover elements, and to add variety. We chose Europa as the brand font. Europa works well for both headers and body copy, and it is widely accessible and legible. The font’s creator describes Europa as ‘a modern sans serif combining geometric reduction and humanistic vitality’; qualities which correspond well with London Youth Gateway’s mission.

We came up with a simple but effective motif involving photographic elements and the geometric shapes that feature across London Youth Gateway’s branding. The block coloured shapes can be filled with photographs representing the young people that the pan-agency charity exist to help. We came up with several iterations for this concept, one of which plays with the shape itself and sees a seated young person’s leg hovering over the base of a triangle.

Another way we incorporated the coloured geometric blocks was through illustration. We created a series of simple expressive designs that can be used like emojis. This was especially useful for our client as it is not always easy, or possible, to feature service-users on site, given the sensitive nature of some cases and the young age of the target audience.

The Lutalica team were a delight to work with. Their values of prioritising projects that support people from marginalised communities lined up perfectly with our values and approach. They really understood our client group and provided a great selection of design solutions for us to explore.

We’re really happy with our new brand and they were very hands on with helping us implement all of their beautiful design work, which made a real difference to the quality of our work. We’re looking forward to working with them in the future and we highly recommend them to anyone looking for modern, original design work.

– Polly Stephens, Communications & Campaigns Manager