UK Action for ME - policies, actions and publications - discussion thread

Sparkly Unicorn said:
The website is better organised but not sure on the new logo. It all cost £43000 though - which is a lot. But maybe that's what branding and websites cost these days?!
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It is for much bigger organisations

I’m not sure what has been involved here etc though and don’t know how much that figure would be in proportion to size (as it relates to amount of work I guess)
 
MrMagoo said:
I don’t think it’s that expensive.
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No, it doesn't sound out of the way. Especially as the job usually involves creating a set of assets that are used elsewhere, it's rarely only a website.

I don't know what one of my former employers paid for the redesign of their logo, but it's been in use for at least 35 years with (I think) only one relatively minor tweak.
 
Sparkly Unicorn said:
The website is better organised but not sure on the new logo.
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I agree. It looks like a blob, there's not much action implicit in that. It's also high contrast and the words are jammed up against each other and in caps, making it hard for readability. Is AfME the light at the end of the tunnel? A bright spot in the sea of darkness that is ME? Still, it's just a logo.

It was great that they ran a pre-launch consultation process and were responsive. Quite a lot of Science for ME members participated in the process.

I haven't looked at a lot of the content, but there is some detailed useful information (it may have been there in the old website) e.g.
https://www.actionforme.org.uk/18-and-under/going-to-school/

I note that they still haven't done anything about that decoy BPS site that comes up when I forget to type Action for ME and instead type 'AfME' into my search engine. I don't know how easy it is to deal with a malicious site like that, perhaps not very easy.
 
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I have always thought a national charity that has that name and now uses that bold new logo should take on the job to lead campaigns yet Action for ME , in contrast to the MS society & parkinsons UK closed their short lived campaigns network a year or so ago. I couldn't see much difference in the website as I briefly use it, which isn't much. Most striking to me & i don’t know if this is new , was the listing of staff in alphabetical order, rather than in order of seniority which put Sonya Chowdhury last not first, the deputy CEO role seem to have gone and surprised that The about the staff section was a “lite” brief what do you enjoy or why did you join and then a question about a hobbie, meal or movie.
 
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Hutan said:


I agree. It looks like a blob, there's not much action implicit in that. It's also high contrast and the words are jammed up against each other and in caps, making it hard for readability. Is AfME the light at the end of the tunnel? A bright spot in the sea of darkness that is ME? Still, it's just a logo.
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I think the logo is unhelpful. I can understand Action for ME continuing to use the term 'ME' on grounds of continuity but isolating it in orange like that is a bad idea.

It is time we moved away from talking of 'ME'. It was an idea for an illness that isn't even the one we are interested in and turned out probably not to be what was claimed. It is also associated in the public mind with yuppie flu and self-diagnosed tiredness.

And the style hardly makes the organisation look serious and authoritative.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
I think the logo is unhelpful. I can understand Action for ME continuing to use the term 'ME' on grounds of continuity but isolating it in orange like that is a bad idea.

It is time we moved away from talking of 'ME'. It was an idea for an illness that isn't even the one we are interested in and turned out probably not to be what was claimed. It is also associated in the public mind with yuppie flu and self-diagnosed tiredness.
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I see your point, but what are our charities to do? AfME, the MEA, MERUK, IiME - they've all got the same problem. It costs a lot of money to change branding, and what if we suddenly discover something that leads to a genuinely pathology-based name? They'd all have to change again, along with changing their website URLs, and they could lose a lot of confused, inattentive or uninformed PwME in the process.

I was persuaded by your arguments for using 'ME/CFS' and have started using it myself instead of 'ME', but it's nevertheless a very awkward name, with connotations of our BPS masters. Moving to that as an interim measure when things could change doesn't seem like a good move.

And the style hardly makes the organisation look serious and authoritative.
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I agree.
 
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Sasha said:
I see your point, but what are our charities to do?
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You miss my point, Sasha. I am not suggesting that AfME change their name. I am just saying that it doesn't help to now have the 'ME" scrawled in bright orange. Until quite recently the major US journal for rheumatology was called 'Arthritis and Rheumatism' despite everyone agreeing that rheumatism was a meaningless term about fifty years ago. It is as if the journal rebranded itself with the 'rheumatism' in huge wonky orange writing. Nobody would ever take it seriously again.

 
Jonathan Edwards said:
You miss my point, Sasha. I am not suggesting that AfME change their name. I am just saying that it doesn't help to now have the 'ME" scrawled in bright orange. Until quite recently the major US journal for rheumatology was called 'Arthritis and Rheumatism' despite everyone agreeing that rheumatism was a meaningless term about fifty years ago. It is as if the journal rebranded itself with the 'rheumatism' in huge wonky orange writing. Nobody would ever take it seriously again.
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Fair point! I just googled 'medical charity logo UK' and clicked on 'Images' and saw a whole load of (admittedly boring) logos where the medical condition isn't emphasised in the design. It could have been done.
 
I also strongly dislike the logo. The black surround looks funereal, the orange ME looks like 'me' as in 'myself' rather than ME, and the blobby shape and wonky script make it look unprofessional. I'd rather they just wrote Action for ME in simple script in a single colour. I hope they didn't waste money on the logo.

Also the Accessibility logo thing is too intrusive, especially on a phone screen.
 
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Sly Saint said:
Doesn't look or feel like a professional makeover when this is the first page that comes up:
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No, it doesn't clear on Safari unless you click one of the links above it. And it's not one of those screens that gets held up because the cookie options box needs to be dealt with first—I'd already declined cookies.

The "back" link works on Firefox and Chrome, but takes you away from the site to a blank page.
 
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