People Solutions saw a gap: WA leaders and people and culture professionals had nowhere to learn from each other. Distl built People Spark from the ground up, including a new brand, identity and membership website.
People Solutions had the expertise, the reputation and the relationships. What it did not have was a brand that could carry a community.
Consulting to an organisation is a service people buy. Convening them into a community is something they join. Running the community under the People Solutions banner would have framed it as an extension of the consultancy, a client offer with the consultancy at the centre.
The market gap was clear. Perth had no dedicated community for the people whose job it is to look after everyone else at work.
The brand was developed under the working name People Innovation Hub, and it did an honest job of describing the container.
As the positioning sharpened, the name moved with it. A hub is a place things pass through. What the community promised was the moment of recognition when the right people are in the same room. That spark is what the name captures, and it gave the identity a symbol to build from.
The brief was to create a brand that would stand on its own, clearly connected to People Solutions’ credibility without depending on it. It had to read as a membership community from the first impression, welcoming without being casual about it.
The fundamentals had to be right before any design began.
We ran an audience and competitor review across the WA market, worked through positioning and messaging with the People Solutions leadership team in a strategy workshop, and defined who the community was for and what it promised.
The output was a written brand strategy and messaging framework that name, identity, collateral and website were all then built against.
People Spark is positioned as a purpose-led, WA-based community for leaders and people and culture professionals. It is not a training provider, and not a membership body in name only.
The positioning turns on bridging the gap between knowing and doing. Members get practical tools, honest conversation and a safe place to think out loud with people who understand the job. That resolved into a tagline that works as an invitation and a promise: Belong. Grow. Lead.
The brandmark is a spark, built from the four things the community runs on: knowledge, voices, connections and the spark that happens when they meet.
Each ray is a different length and weight, so the mark reads as movement. It gives the brand a sense of a community in motion. It holds up at lanyard scale and as a full-bleed graphic device, which matters for a brand that has to work across an event stage, a tote bag and a membership dashboard. The full brand identity was documented in a brand book alongside master logo files for the People Spark team.
The palette pairs a deep navy with a high-energy lime, softened by a warm cream and a teal mid-tone.
Navy carries the credibility inherited from 25 years of People Solutions work. Lime brings the optimism and the energy, and it is what makes People Spark recognisable at a glance in a category that defaults to corporate blue. Cream and teal give the system room to breathe across long-form resources and the membership site.
A community brand is judged on consistency. Members meet it at an event, on a lanyard, in a newsletter and inside a member portal, often in the same week.
We rolled the identity out across the full collateral suite: business cards, signage, pull-up banners, presentation folders, apparel, social templates, and PowerPoint and Word templates the team can run themselves. The brand then landed online as a membership website built on Distl’s modular website design framework, with event listings, a gated resource library, member accounts and three membership tiers running through checkout. SEO foundations and a migration plan were built in before launch so the new domain started clean.
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