Inclusive Branding: Accessibility in Brand Design

Colour that survives being colour-blind

Around 300 million people worldwide live with some form of colour blindness — roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women. WCAG’s contrast ratios — 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text — technically don’t apply to logos. We’d treat that as a loophole rather than permission.

The test we come back to is a simple one: drop the logo into greyscale. If it disappears, or two elements that were meant to sit apart suddenly collapse into each other, colour was doing structural work it shouldn’t have been. More often than not, that’s because the logo was leaning on colour to get its vibe — the warmth, the energy, the personality — rather than building it into the shape itself. Meaning should never rely on colour alone; it needs a shape, an icon, a label standing behind it, carrying more of that emotional weight so colour can be the finish, not the foundation. I see this a lot in my tutoring work: a student’s colour system looks crisp on screen, then falls apart the moment it’s printed — two shades that were distinct on a monitor collapse into near-identical greys on paper. Not a disaster, but a reminder that colour accessibility isn’t just a digital-swatch problem.

Type that doesn’t ask people to work harder

Elaborate serifs and script faces look considered in a mood board and become a barrier the moment someone with dyslexia tries to read them at speed. The fixes are unglamorous: generous letter and word spacing, simpler letterforms, clear differentiation between characters that are easy to confuse — a capital I and a lowercase l, a zero and a letter O.

This isn’t a body-copy-on-websites issue. It’s a packaging issue, a signage issue, a print-run issue. A typeface chosen for its personality on a hero banner still has to carry an ingredients list or a wayfinding sign later, and it needs to do that job just as well.

Packaging people can actually open

Accessible packaging applies universal design so the same pack works for everyone, rather than shipping a “special” version for people with limited dexterity. That means tactile cues, ergonomic grips, easy-open closures, sufficient contrast between text and background, sometimes Braille. TILT Beauty is a good example of what this looks like when it’s built in from the start rather than retrofitted — the brand was designed around arthritis, tremor and reduced grip strength, not around them as an afterthought.

There’s a commercial case here too, if you need one: the spending power of disabled people and their families in the UK — known as the purple pound — is close to £274 billion a year. We’d rather make the case on the design being better for more people. But it’s worth knowing the number exists.

Signage and the physical space around a brand

Wayfinding is where brand and accessibility collide most literally — pictogram systems, mounting height, colour contrast against the wall behind it. Designers who think in systems here, rather than sign by sign, tend to produce spaces that feel considered and genuinely usable by everyone, not spaces that merely tick a compliance box. It’s the same logic as a brand guidelines document, just applied to a building instead of a template.

The words themselves

Visual identity gets most of the attention, but verbal identity — tone, vocabulary, the actual sentences a brand puts in front of someone — carries its own accessibility weight. Plain language, minimal ambiguity, instructions that say what they mean. For anyone who doesn’t fully experience the visual side of a brand, the words are doing more of the work than usual, not less.

Calm, not just compliant

There’s a broader shift happening towards what some designers call the “aesthetic of calm” — muted palettes, predictable layouts, less visual noise competing for attention. Some sources point to orange and peach backgrounds paired with darker text being easier to follow for dyslexic and autistic audiences specifically. We wouldn’t treat that as gospel — audiences vary, and one palette won’t suit everyone — but it’s a useful nudge away from assuming “bold and busy” is the only way to feel confident on a shelf.

Does accessibility mean the same thing for every brand?

Not quite. GOV.UK is the useful edge case here — its audience is, by definition, everyone, so accessibility isn’t sitting alongside the brand brief, it more or less is the brief. When the people you’re designing for stretch across the whole population, “works for the widest possible range of them” and “does its job well” converge into roughly the same test. Get accessibility right and you’ve largely got the brand right too.

Most of us aren’t designing for that audience. When the audience is narrower — a niche B2B product, a boutique with a defined customer base, a brand with a strong point of view — accessibility doesn’t matter less. Instead, it stops being a checklist to satisfy and becomes a lens to apply judgement through. The question isn’t just “have we hit 4.5:1 contrast everywhere,” it’s “who does this choice leave out, and does that trade-off actually make sense for what we’re building.” The standards are a floor. They were never meant to replace asking the question properly.

Why it matters

None of this is a checklist to bolt on before a deck goes out. It’s a lens, applied everywhere a brand actually touches someone — the shelf, the sign above the door, the hold-music script nobody designs on purpose but somebody wrote. Treat it that way and the audience widens well past people who’d identify as needing an accommodation, because clear type, plain language and packaging that opens on the first try are things most of us want on a bad day, disability or not. That’s the argument for building accessibility into the strategy stage, rather than checking it at the end.