Take a first look at
our evolved brand

We’re refreshing and evolving elements of the NIHR brand in 2026.

With our 20th anniversary year well underway, it’s more important than ever that our brand truly represents what we stand for: driving life-changing research for the health and wealth of the nation. 

The incoming brand evolution will help us to increase awareness of NIHR among our key audiences and position our core themes of impact, inclusion, investment and innovation at the centre of everything we do. 

The changes closely complement the core NIHR messaging we released in late 2025. This reinforces the connection between us and the government’s priorities for health and social care - such as the ‘3 shifts’ outlined in the 10 Year Health Plan and their mission of building an NHS fit for the future.

Each change has been informed by feedback from colleagues across NIHR and the Department of Health and Social Care. Considerations around digital accessibility, creating brand consistency across NIHR and enhancing our global reputation have all influenced this evolution.

Read our full refreshed visual identity brand guidelines and brand architecture guidelines for all the details ahead of the rollout.

Embedding our identity principles and adapting for different audiences 

We want our brand to consistently represent 3 core principles: accessible, expressive and purposeful.

• Accessible - NIHR should be inclusive to all, and our designs should be barrier free

• Expressive - our brand should bring our work to life and express the right tone

• Purposeful - visual assets should be used to enhance the experience of our audiences

We know NIHR communication significantly varies in its nature. Sometimes we’re writing to inform researchers or government officials. On other occasions, we’re engaging with young audiences or promoting an exciting opportunity to the public.

Each scenario requires a slightly different use of our branding. Our refreshed brand gives the flexibility we need to adapt to these different situations through our use of colour, photography, graphic elements and much more.

Whatever information you’re sharing, elements of our brand can now be more easily dialed up or down to suit the needs of your audience, while still looking and sounding like NIHR.    

Key changes 

Visually, the main changes you’ll notice are to our font, colour palette and graphics.

We’ve updated the NIHR logo to reflect the revised colour palette and new font. All other elements in the logo remain the same. 

We’ll be using 2 main fonts as part of our refreshed brand: Archia and Inclusive Sans. Where Archia and Inclusive Sans are unavailable, Arial remains as our alternative system font.

Archia is our licensed headline font. You’ll see it in our logo and on official NIHR channels, like our website and social media. 

Inclusive Sans is our main body font. This font is available in Google, so please use this when creating Google Docs, Slides and other Google products.

We’ve retained our recognisable navy blue and coral primary colours - with a slight alteration to improve their digital accessibility. There is now a stronger contrast between the 2 colours, making it easier to use both colours on a wider range of designs.

Our secondary colours offer creativity and plenty of options for tailoring your content to different audiences and purposes. Whether you’re creating informative reports or engaging campaign material, our revised colour palette offers the flexibility you need to make the right impression.

We’re also retiring our motifs. In their place will be a smaller graphics set, plus an official set of icons and illustration featuring NIHR’s colour palette. 

NIHR logos for our schemes and services

We’re giving greater prominence to each of NIHR’s overall scheme names as part of the refreshed brand. This will help us drive consistency and improve audience understanding of each of our schemes and services.

We've created a logo for each scheme and service. Every location and specialism within a scheme will use the same logo. When needed, such as on a website, you’ll be able to add a text descriptor that identifies the resource as belonging to a specific location or specialism within the scheme.

This change in how individual names are shown visually will significantly reduce the number of NIHR logos, giving greater coherence to the story we want to tell of the life-changing research that takes place across each scheme.

The timeline for rolling out our evolved brand 

We’ll be introducing elements of the refreshed brand on our main corporate channels from February 2026. You’ll notice changes gradually appearing in places like the NIHR comms site; The Bridge, our NIHRCC/RDN intranet; our core social media channels and the main NIHR website at this stage.

We’ll share branding assets with communications teams in coordinating centres during February and comms leads in infrastructure, schools and units in March - this will include key templates and logo files. We will also advise researchers funded by research and career development programmes to update their acknowledgment logos where used.

We’ve planned a phased rollout of the evolved brand across all our channels, systems, digital assets and printed materials between now and July. We’re expecting the brand rollout will be completed in the NIHRCC and RDN by the end of April. Our target for infrastructure, schools and units is the end of July.

We’re expecting that all new printed and physical materials will reflect our refreshed logos and brand by the end of 2026, with existing stock used up where possible to avoid wastage. 

Communicating about the brand refresh

This article follows February’s NIHR communications webinar and it is the first written announcement we’ve shared about the brand refresh. We’ve published it to make sure our NIHR communicators have an opportunity to read about the changes before we share the news with more colleagues.

We’ll share this same information with directors in infrastructure, schools, units and RRDN network by Friday 20 February. We’re doing this to raise awareness among senior leaders of the incoming changes, and also to support our communications leads as they share the information with our colleagues across infrastructure, schools and units.

Communications Programme Board (CPB) members will share the brand changes in their respective areas of NIHRCC and RDN. We’ll be asking CPB to add the brand refresh to upcoming all staff meeting agendas. These slots will be used to update colleagues on the main changes and explain the brand support available to them.

Your questions answered

We’ve developed a frequently asked questions webpage on our brand changes. We’ll keep this document updated as we begin to roll out the refreshed brand.

Please email brand@nihr.ac.uk if you have any more questions about the brand evolution.