Open PointCopied

Open Point is the company behind Social Pinpoint, a community engagement tool, and Consultation Manager, a stakeholder management product. Used by more than 750 organisations across three continents, they help developers, councils and infrastructure providers run public consultations on roads, homes and energy schemes while meeting strict regulatory requirements. In 2026 the two were merged into one platform, and London agency 20(Something) created the masterbrand, website and a series of brand films, Design Week, Creative Review and BP&O reported.

The brief had two audiences: infrastructure clients and state agencies who answer to regulators, and the members of the public being consulted. Founder and creative partner Will Thacker said the challenge was speaking to organisations running high-stakes projects without losing the accessibility that genuine public participation needs.

The agency deliberately avoided the stock imagery of civic engagement, such as speech bubbles, handshakes and connected dots. Its concept was that the tools a society uses shape the places it builds, which led to the chisel, used to carve early Latin letters into civic buildings. Those letterforms have long signalled trust and authority, and the identity draws a line from them to today's digital tools for public decision-making. Design Week described high-contrast capitals with sharp, angular terminals and distinctive crossbars on letters such as E, F, W and A. BP&O identified the display face as Memoir, with Roman proportions, paired with the variable grotesque ABC Social. The system runs through branding, the product, motion and films.

BP&O placed the look within a wider fashion for refined editorial serifs, the kind seen on museum identities and expensive oat-milk cartons, and noted a resemblance between Open Point's icon and one on the type foundry's own site.

The chisel idea is genuinely good, specific and rooted in civic history. The execution is more fashionable than the idea, and that is the risk: a concept about permanence wearing this season's typography.