Readers Digest Equity Release

Reader’s Digest equity release is built on a foundation of their values, where they want to continue offering the best information and guidance that they can. Helping you will find out how your property wealth can help you to fund your retirement.

I needed to refresh the brand to help move Reader’s Digest Equity Release out of its perceived niche and give it clarity and coherence in a landscape where equity release has increasingly moved into the mainstream and looks visually sophisticated.

Reader’s Digest Equity Release. Made for you. The everyday people.

My task was to position RDER as the pioneers that they are in helping everyday people consider their options, including the alternatives to equity release so that they can approach the solutions available to them with the utmost confidence.

Reader’s Digest has built over 100 years of trust. Its Equity Release division is run by a dedicated team of passionate individuals who want to help their customers use their money in line with what is best for them.

For this reason, I developed the smile, the human, approachable face of Reader’s Digest Equity Release. The smile features in the brand logo and adds some playfulness and energy to a range of brand touchpoints.

To make Reader’s Digest Equity Release the ‘go-to place’ for all things equity release, I needed to create an identity that challenged the industry norm, ensuring it felt slick and less ’cliche retirement’.

The contemporary brand identity features a bright and positive colour palette that works with a friendly and approachable typeface. We stayed clear of cliched retirement imagery and developed a simple, ownable illustration icon style that showcases the areas and things you can do with the money you release from your property.

The brand photography shows the wide range of everyday people who have used Reader’s Digest Equity Release service to live their best later life.

The icon style I created for the brand focussed on all the things the customer could do with the money they released. From downsizing, taking the holiday they have always dreamed of, renovating their existing home, helping their children get on the property ladder, or even paying off an existing mortgage.

I created abstract line icons of these examples and when pieced together like a jigsaw it creates a striking background pattern for the design system.

Thanks to Steve Wilkie and John Wilkie at Responsible Life and Charlie Davies for the logo animation.