Introducing the new International Confederation of Midwives brand and website!
Over the past two years, the International Confederation of Midwives has been engaged in work to reimagine our brand and website in alignment with our organisational values, mission, and vision for the future of midwifery. Our renewed brand emerged from a collaborative, consultative process with input from across the entire organisation. Throughout the visual design and web development process, we made strategic decisions to reinforce accessibility and inclusivity.
Visual Identity
The transformation began with our visual identity: the logo, colour palette, and typography that help our community recognise us.
We took the roots of our former ICM logo — which captured the relationships between midwives and the communities we serve — and released the figures from their former boundaries to showcase the expansiveness and emancipatory nature of midwifery care. The overlapping figures in the new logo suggest the intersectional and holistic care that midwives provide. The two figures are equally sized to uplift the equitable and balanced partnership between a midwives, women and gender diverse people. Through this refreshed logo, we sought to amplify the midwife as a caring and responsible health professional ensuring wellbeing before, during and after pregnancy.
Our new logo retains the iconic ICM blue and orange but stands out as a bold, bright, and fresh reinterpretation of our look and feel. And to top it off, we further developed logos for ICM member associations and for each of our regions to represent our global community.
Beyond the colours of our logo, we developed a broad, flexible, and dynamic colour palette. The extensive colour palette allows us to pair colours together that have sufficient contrast to be clearly visible for people with colour blindness. We have also taken care to ensure that our new typefaces are easier to read and therefore more accessible to everyone.
Photography
During the process to renew our visual identity, we identified a gap that affected not only our visual communications, but the work of midwives in general. We lacked a library of photography showcasing the full scope a midwife’s practice. Our new diverse range of professional photos is essential to uplift the importance of midwives in transforming sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn and adolescent health and rights.
In this process, we sought out photographers to engage in this visual storytelling depicting midwives in action across their scope of practice, so that we could craft a comprehensive midwifery photography bank. We engaged with our member associations, the midwife-led birth centres research team, and partner organisations so that photographers could capture the work of midwives across a diversity of settings, areas of practice, geographies, cultures, and identities.
Our photography bank now consists of more than 800 photographs showcasing midwives in Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, Haiti, Japan, Pakistan, Rwanda, Uganda, and the United States. And there is more to come!
Website
We have two exciting words for you: search bar.
We have a lot more to say about our new website, but responding to your requests to make it easier to find the information and resources you need, when you need them, was a priority. As we embarked on our mission to build a new website, we centred the needs and wants of our global community. This means we have sought to build a site that is intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Resource Library
Our members told us that it was difficult to locate ICM’s resources and understand how to use them. In response to this, we built a resource library that allows you to easily filter based on our Professional Framework for Midwifery and see what each resource is at-a-glance. The content of most resources is within the article, not requiring a download, which makes it more friendly for you to access (and for screen readers as well), and easier to use with automatic translation. No more clicking through lists of links to find the PDF you’re looking for!
Community Events and News
Our community shared that we should do more to facilitate connection and collaboration between our member associations through events. In response to this, you’ll find a new events page featuring both ICM events and events hosted by our members. Our member associations now can easily submit their events, opening them up to the global community. Our members can also submit stories to be featured on our blog.
Member Benefits
Our members further informed us that they have been unsure of what support ICM can provide them and how to approach us to get it. Our website now has a page all about our member benefits and ways you can access these benefits.
Accessibility Features
As you navigate the site, we encourage you to use the accessibility tools to easily increase font sizes and contrast, developed to support people with dyslexia, low vision, and colour blindness.
We hope that you love the new look and feel of ICM. If you face any issues with the new website, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at communications@internationalmidwives.org. Your input is how we ensure that we are meeting the needs of the community!
