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GrevilleaBlooms
Senior Contributor

SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

Hi all,

 

As you’ve probably noticed, the forums are looking different! SANE has relaunched, with a refreshed brand, and with that has come some changes to the look and feel of the forums. 

 

We have been passing on all of the feedback we’ve been hearing from you on to the team, and we thought it might be helpful to create a space where you can share your thoughts and ask any questions. 

 

We know that adjusting to change can be challenging, and appreciate that it may feel quite unsettling when a familiar environment looks and feels different. We’re continuing to work on ironing out any bugs and making improvements as we go, and we really appreciate your patience with this process. 

 

We also thought it might be helpful to give a bit more information about the new SANE brand and what lies behind it: 

 

  • We are now SANE, not SANE AUSTRALIA, and we are bold, bright and unapologetic. 
  • We focus on complex mental health, breaking barriers and raising expectations for people with complex mental health conditions and their family and friends. 
  • 'Complex’ does not fit neatly or conform, and our identity is crafted around making space for difference. Letters grow and shrink out of place; shapes are disrupted; and colours are unapologetic – creating a fearless voice for change and a strong coherent presence across all moments. It consciously incorporates difference.
  • Our tagline is ‘We’re People Like You’. This talks to the fact that lived experience is at the heart of what we do. 

 

We want SANE's new look to make people stop and think. And to consider whether we need to learn to be more comfortable with difference as a society – to push boundaries and make space for people living with complex mental health issues.

 

If you’d like to read more about SANE’s growing service model, you can do that here

 

We will be organising an opportunity for the sane community to ask any questions directly to the SANE team in a live Q&A event soon- in the meantime, we’d love to hear any feedback or questions you may have here! 

 

We hope you like it as much as we do! Let us know what you think 🖤

 

29 REPLIES 29

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

Hi @Zoe7 @Teej  @TAB @Former-Member @Gwynn @chibam  just tagging people who've shared feedback about the new SANE brand and look of the forums-  there's some more detail here about what lies behind some aspects of the branding, and a place to provide any more feedback 😀

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

Thanks for the information, @GrevilleaBlooms

 

I've already managed to adblock the SANNNE logo everywhere I can because it annoys me - sometimes you don't want to lean into the uncertainties.  I can't do the same with the pink dot under wherever I am in the website, though.  Sometimes it's difficult to get the sense of where's clickable on the website and where's not, and sometimes there is tiny light grey text on this new white background which could cause problems for people with low vision

 

The new flydown screens often get in the way of accessing the forums for me - the Web Accessibility Guidelines from w3.org say "People with reduced dexterity, such as tremors, often have trouble operating fly-out menus. For some...".  As tremors can be a not-uncommon result of medications, it seems remiss for SANE to rely on people having good dexterity to operate the website. 

 

I am glad that making thread titles default to ALL CAPS has been removed.  The night-time filter is helping. 

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

Will reply here more fully another time @GrevilleaBlooms - a lot to say (I am sure you are not surprised lol) For now I will just say - I cannot believe (again) that the community here was not consulted in these changes. For an organisation that supposedly values inclusion and consultation - the ready made audience, and those directly affected by these changes, have had NO input ...very, very disappointing!

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

I agree @Zoe7

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

Hi @Zoe7 , I think that's really valid feedback, and please do keep it coming.  We are passing everything on to the marketing team and want to make sure your voices are heard. In terms of consultation, as I understand it there was a lot of co-design done in this process with people with lived experience, but I'm sorry if that didn't include the people in this community 

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

Hi @Gwynn , thanks so much for that feedback- that is all really valuable, and I will make sure we pass all of that on to our marketing team. With the colours, there are some website browser extensions like Midnight Lizard (for Chrome) that will let you change all of the colours of a webpage, though this may affect some functionality it might be worth having a play around with - this page also has some great tips for different browsers. You may be across this already but i thought it was worth sharing in case it's helpful to other people as well 🙂 

 

We really appreciate you taking the time to give us this feedback and hope that some of the tweaks you've found will help make your experience navigating the forums more comfortable.  I hope you're having a lovely night! 

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

Thanks @GrevilleaBlooms for saying you'll take my feedback to the marketing team. I know budgets are tight, but I just wish that AA WCAG 2.0 or 2.1 compliance was built in from the start in the redesign - it just doesn't seem to have been considered as part of the baseline. 

Re: SANE has a new look! Learn more and give your feedback here

@GrevilleaBlooms To be straight forward here - consulting with people with lived experience does not matter at all IF they do not or have not actually been part of the forum. We can pretend that this consultation is ticking boxes however to completely overlook those actually using this platform is not just an oversight but more frankly it is devaluing. Surely those actually using the service should be the first people consulted - this is not just a failure in the consultation but a 'slap in the face' to all of us here that so readily voice our concerns (regularly) that the people actually affected by such changes/policies etc. are never the ones actually consulted with ....over 32,000 members and not one consulted with - a ready made audience for consultation yet none involved ...this goes beyond disappointment - it actually denigrates all users to the bottom of the barrel and by default says we have no voice. I would ask "when will those actually affected by such changes - whether it be changes on the forums, changes in policies, changes in an organisation's vision, etc. - be involved in these changes?"

Hello Forums Community,   The Marketing and Communicatio...

Hello Forums Community,

 

The Marketing and Communications team really appreciate the honest feedback around our new brand and have written the below which hopefully will give a bit more context to the decisions that have been made.

 

When SANE launched its new guided service and strategic plan last month, we saw it as a great opportunity to refresh our look, to rebrand our organisation. We wanted our public face to reflect our new direction and renewed energy, to let the world know that we were ‘the same SANE but different’.  

 

With an agency, we conducted a brand review: consulting the SANE community, conducting surveys with service users including Forums members. As well as consulting lived experience organisations and looking at the branding of other mental health organisations. The conclusion was that SANE was lost and barely distinguishable in a crowded mental health sector. Our website looked like other mental health websites, our pamphlets merged with other pamphlets in the waiting room rack, our logo was not widely recognised. This was unwelcome news for an organisation wanting to reach as many people who need support as possible.   

 

When we listened to the SANE community, they told us being diverse and inclusive was important to them. Championing the voices of people with lived experience and fighting stigma distinguished us. We heard SANE described as ‘open’, ‘welcoming’, ‘courageous’, ‘outspoken’ and ‘life-changing’. We took all this into re-branding the organisation. 

 

Brand projects are a difficult balance between taking feedback and progressing work. We want to avoid having ‘too many chefs in the kitchen’ while also incorporating feedback from across several stakeholder groups, many of which have different ideas for what SANE should look like. We solicited ongoing feedback from lived experience organisations, SANE services team, our directors, staff and board, and more, trying to give voice to stakeholders across the entire organisation. We understand the Forums community would’ve liked to be more involved and we apologise that some in the community felt totally excluded from the process. 

 

The new logo and branding are bold and unmistakable because this is how our community sees us. The new logo with its stretched-out 'N’ is distinctive and our new font is strong and loud, suitable for an organisation speaking out for people with complex mental health issues. The multi-coloured blocks grab the attention, but also reflect the diversity we believe in. Inclusivity and a sense of community, as well as diversity, are encapsulated in the portrait images that humanise the design: they look like real people, not models, not stock images, like someone you would know. Thus, our new tagline: 'We're people like you.’       

 

When we launched this new branding last month, we knew it would not be to everyone's taste. While the response has been largely positive, we've been open and receptive to criticism. Some of the colours were too bright or garish; some headlines felt a bit too in-your-face; some elements didn't read easily on certain devices; and print materials required a different approach to things published electronically.  The changes to the forum pages particularly affected our community and we will continue to take suggestions for IT and tech solutions to make the forums comfortable and accessible for everyone. Indeed, we are still adjusting all the new branding elements, looking for the right balance while learning how to optimise their impact. 

 

It will take all of us a little time to get use to the new look, but we're sure you'll come to see this bold, distinctive brand not as a collection of fonts, logos and visual elements, but as something familiar and recognisable, representing the bold, distinctive values of SANE.  

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this and to reiterate, we understand the frustration from the community regarding being consulted on these changes.

 

In the meantime, we welcome your comments and suggestions: content@sane.org 

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