The Challenge

BCRF has more than three decades of credibility, a global network of leading scientists, and a singular focus on advancing breast cancer research. But its visual identity needed a stronger system to communicate the scale and significance of that work.

Across a growing ecosystem of materials, the brand lacked consistency and hierarchy. Some applications felt more institutional and dated than the organization itself, while the broader visual identity needed more warmth, personality, and flexibility. Most importantly, BCRF’s defining difference needed to be much harder to miss: research**.**

BCRF is the largest private funder of breast cancer research and metastatic breast cancer research worldwide. Research is not one part of what the organization does. It is the foundation of its work.

Our challenge was to make that authority, rigor, and focus visible.

The Strategy

We approached BCRF as a connected brand system.

We began by establishing a clearer hierarchy and stronger visual rules across typography, imagery, color, pattern, layout, and brand application. The goal was to create a system recognizable enough to feel unmistakably BCRF and flexible enough to work anywhere the organization needs to show up.

And BCRF shows up in a lot of places. From national campaigns and public activations to fundraising materials and partner communications, our work creates the connective tissue between them.

The result is a more distinctive, contemporary, and cohesive expression of BCRF that keeps the organization’s defining focus on research at the center.

Brand Development + Core Collateral

A brand doing work at this level needs a visual identity that carries the same weight.

We’re standardizing BCRF’s brand guidelines and applying the evolving identity across the materials its team uses every day, including presentation templates, social media templates, fundraising mailers and brochures, email designs and signatures, one-pagers, and other core collateral.

The work goes beyond consistency. We’re helping BCRF establish a more distinct and recognizable presence within the breast cancer space. That has meant introducing greater personality and sophistication, strengthening hierarchy, and refining how typography, imagery, color, patterns, and other brand elements work together.

We also provided creative direction and feedback to the external agency responsible for BCRF’s logo redesign, helping improve its legibility, scalability, and application across different formats and sizes.

The color system presented another opportunity. The refined palette creates a more mature, confident, and sophisticated expression of pink that better reflects the seriousness and significance of BCRF’s work.

Together, these changes have given BCRF a more recognizable identity and a practical system their team can carry forward. Clear guidelines and flexible templates make it easier to create new materials while maintaining a cohesive brand across teams and touch-points.

Web Design

The evolution of the BCRF brand also extends to its primary digital experience.

Backtalk is refreshing the website’s design and styling, with a focus on improving UI and UX while bringing the digital experience into closer alignment with the evolving visual identity.

As the broader brand system becomes more cohesive across campaigns, collateral, editorial, and partner communications, the website becomes an important piece of that same ecosystem: a digital expression of BCRF that is current, recognizable, and connected to the organization people encounter everywhere else.

October 2026 Campaign

October is BCRF’s most important moment of the year for fundraising and awareness, making the 2026 campaign a major opportunity to introduce the refreshed brand to audiences on a national scale.

Built around Today’s Research, Tomorrow’s Cures., the campaign makes research visible, understandable, and actionable by connecting tomorrow’s breakthroughs to the work being funded today.

We’re translating that idea into a campaign system spanning PSA designs for magazines, billboards, and publications nationwide, along with social templates, campaign toolkits, partner brand guides, merchandise, co-branded assets, and website updates. The work also extends to a Grand Central activation with postcards and additional campaign materials.

The campaign builds directly from BCRF’s refreshed identity without simply repeating the foundational brand. It has its own look and energy, giving October a recognizable campaign expression while showing just how flexible the larger BCRF system can be.

Pink Press

BCRF’s research-first identity also comes to life through Pink Press, a publication featuring work from BCRF-funded researchers.

Backtalk is developing the publication’s editorial design direction and a cohesive layout system across up to 20 pages, including editorial planning and page allocation, cover design, photography placement and treatment, and approaches for charts, pull quotes, callouts, infographics, and supporting graphics.

The publication will be produced in both print-ready and interactive digital formats, creating an editorial experience that can flex across how audiences encounter the content.

For a brand built around science, Pink Press creates an important opportunity to give the research itself more room to lead. The editorial system brings greater hierarchy and visual storytelling to complex information while creating a distinct space for the researchers, discoveries, and ideas behind BCRF’s work.

Project Notes

What this project has reinforced for us is the difference between designing a brand and designing a brand system at scale.

BCRF has an enormous range of audiences, partners, platforms, and applications. The answer could never be one rigid visual formula applied everywhere. It required building enough consistency for the brand to remain recognizable while creating enough flexibility for a research publication, national campaign, fundraising mailer, partner asset, and website to each do something different.

Working this closely with an organization whose mission carries this much weight has also reinforced the responsibility design has in making important work easier to understand, recognize, and engage with. The better the system becomes, the more clearly BCRF can communicate the research, people, and progress at the center of its work.