Northbank Health: a whole estate, derived from one hue

Northbank ran eleven service brands with eleven palettes, none of which had a defined relationship to the others. The estate had grown by accretion: a new clinic opened, someone opened the brand PDF, picked a blue that felt distinct, and shipped it.

What we actually changed

We replaced the eleven palettes with one hue token per service and a single derived ramp. Every tint in the system is the same perceptual lightness regardless of which hue it sits on, which means a clinic can pick its own identity colour without anyone checking whether body text still passes contrast. It does, by construction.

The argument was never about which blue. It was about who gets to decide, and how often.

The part that was harder than the colour

Naming. Eleven teams had eleven words for the same component. We spent more of the engagement on a shared vocabulary than on the visual system, and it is the reason the visual system survived the first six months.

Where it ended up

The tokens live in the CMS. The communications lead has changed the palette twice since we left, once for a public health campaign and once because a sub-brand was retired. Neither change required us.