Accounting, tax and advisory firm Blick Rothenberg was looking to create an intranet to act as a central communication and collaboration tool for its staff.

The firm appointed us to create a fun and engaging brand for the new platform. As this was Blick Rothenberg’s first-ever intranet, the brand needed to grab the user’s attention and keep it.

The challenge

Blick Rothenberg had invested in an off-the-shelf intranet platform but wanted to customise the look and feel to match its brand. As a rapidly growing organisation with over 500 members of staff, productivity and engagement of the team are integral to its success.

The user experience of the staff was paramount to the intranet project. Not only did the platform need to reflect the brand guidelines of the company, Blick Rothenberg also wanted it to include something unique to spark inspiration and interaction.

What we did

The marketing team at Blick Rothenberg devised the concept of BRian the owl, a Blick Rothenberg mascot to act as a point of contact for all internal queries. BRian would help as a visual aid to induct new staff members and provide existing staff with information on all firmwide and corporate news, office hubs, events and CSR. BRian would also oversee the central training and template hubs, as well as the people directory giving the growing firm lots more information about their colleagues at all the office locations.

Our creative team provided the illustrations to bring BRian to life. We created ten additional versions of BRian to be used in different scenarios and to account for seasonality.

As well as the introduction of BRian, we originated a fresh design from Blick Rothenberg’s palette based on a templated system, using the brands secondary colour palette. This ensured the brand was as consistent on the intranet as it was offline and on the main website, but that the intranet had a softer feel for the internal audience.

The creative was then originated on Sketch. After the design was finalised with the Blick Rothenberg team, we used Zeplin – an industry-leading collaboration tool – to pass over the design system to the developers.

We ensured elements including call to action buttons, lines, fonts, navigation and slideshows were styled consistently. We used Zeplin to communicate detailed information about these elements so that our vision would be replicated in the code of the site.

What the client said

“It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Itineris on the branding and design of our intranet. The enthusiasm the design team showed for our character throughout the project was amazing and this really helped us bring BRian to life.

One of the main objectives of the project was to create something that was engaging for all of our people and BRian’s character, in particular, has helped us achieve this.

Itineris’ guidance on our office imagery used on BRian also helped to make such an impact, as it helped the system resonate with our people from day one.

BRian has already become an integral part of life at Blick Rothenberg, connecting all our office locations and acting as the one-stop-shop for all Blick Rothenberg information and news.

Charlotte Till, Assistant Marketing Manager, Blick Rothenberg

Launch

The Blick Rothenberg marketing team launched the intranet to staff and it has already had a positive response. Employees are now able to access document libraries, events, CSR information, annual appraisal documentation and latest news all from one central location.