A font that mimics the flow of blood through the human body. This was the challenge laid down by the British Heart Foundation, as the charity got set for an exciting brand refresh.
F37® designed the British Heart Foundation’s first bespoke typeface. It takes inspiration from our iconic logo, giving us a unique and ownable asset that we call BHF Beats. The characters denote the flow and connectivity of our circulatory system, which helps us talk about our promise to beat heartbreak forever by raising money to fund research to prevent, detect, cure and treat heart & circulatory diseases. We feel that it brings warmth and personality to our communications.
The British Heart Foundation is a UK charity organisation. Founded in 1961, the BHF pumps hundreds of millions of pounds into life-changing research every year. Branding agency Wolff Olins was asked to give the BHF a much-needed brand refresh.
Wolff Olins were creating an ambitious, distinctive identity to revive BHF’s fundraising effort and wanted a new font to be an integral part of this. The brief from WO was that the font had to express the idea of ‘flow’; it needed to feel smooth and fluid.
Working alongside Wolff Olins, we were commissioned to create a new bespoke font for the British Heart Foundation. The letterforms are based on its iconic logo, which features the waves of a heartbeat. The font comes in three weights and includes numerous ligatures, mimicking the flow of the logo. The design is packed with personality and is distinctively BHF.
The website, launched using the new brand expression, has shown a 7% increase in visitors year-on-year, and an increase in one-off donations of 26%.