Creating the visual identity to connect New Zealand’s emergency services

As a new government initiative that spans across multiple organisations, Next Generation Critical Communications (NGCC) is the lead advisor on critical communications for public safety in New Zealand. Made up of NZ Police, Fire & Emergency NZ, Wellington Ambulance, and St John’s Ambulance, they needed to create an identity for their service offerings that they could bring to the market. This programme, and the brand around it, needed to help connect New Zealand’s front line emergency services.  

NGCC approached Silverstripe to help them create the brand for the new entity that they could go to market with and let everybody know about it too. That brand became Public Safety Network (PSN), the new communications service that will be used by New Zealand’s frontline emergency services. 

During the early stages of the project, NGCC brought in our Strategy & Design team to meet with the key stakeholders and lay out the foundation for building a new identity for the programme. We discovered that we needed to help NGCC develop a brand architecture that would give them a hierarchy between their organisation and the programme. It gave our key stakeholders the clarity they needed to think more critically about what the goals were for each brand entity and how they wanted them to be positioned within the New Zealand setting. 

Once we’d established a brand architecture within NGCC, we were able to effectively categorise the audiences for each entity and better understand what the programme needed to deliver to them. It was important to keep in mind that the audiences for the programme, while spread across a wide range of services, needed to all clearly understand what the point of the programme was. 

While there were many different stakeholders, it was important to keep the users of the services at the heart of the brand. When there was a range of names and logo designs, we performed user testing across users of our frontline emergency services to see how they’d interpret the meanings behind them. They wanted a brand that, visually, was strong, trustworthy, and highlighted the connection between the services that would be using the digital communications network. With their valuable insights, we were able to take their feedback and translate it into an effective brand that connects with different audiences in emergency services in New Zealand. 

Together, our team and NGCC were able to create a strong, adaptable visual identity for their new programme called Public Safety Network (PSN). The brand around the service represents who they are and what they offer—a service to connect our frontline emergency services workers and deliver critical communications to them. Visually, it demonstrates the link between each of the organisations that are part of the network while highlighting that the programme is the voice for communications within our public safety organisations in New Zealand too. 

• Branding
• Brand strategy
• Brand architecture
• Visual identity
• Visual design system
• Industry analysis
• User research
• Strategy & Design
• Discovery workshops
• User testing