University of the Arts London

University of the Arts London (UAL) is comprised of a constellation of campuses across the capital. They range from the premier fashion institute in the UK to offers of courses in media and design, from fine arts and conservation to photography. Before 2012, what united these stars in the UK’s arts education universe was a diagonal ‘University of the Arts London’ wordmark alongside six coloured stars for each of the six individual campuses.

To bring those six diverse colleges together under one brand, UAL approached Pentagram to devise a visual identity that would turn a smattering of stars into something quite different. Partner at the agency, Domenic Lippa, took point on the account and brought his own UAL education to bear in designing a new look for his alma mater.

“This was not a vanity exercise,” Lippa says. “The University wanted a solution that was more robust and recognisable. Our approach was to engage with as many key stakeholders – listen to what their issues were and to build a solution to support what they wanted. This wasn’t a difficult process as you might have imagined – I found there was consensus across the University and colleges for what they wanted the new identity to be like and to achieve.”

Dee Searle, director of communications at UAL, says the new brand would need to allow the individual colleges to express their distinctiveness while simultaneously strengthening the overarching UAL identity. She says Lippa and Pentagram were the right pick for the job because they understood that, in UAL’s story, the heroes are the students and staff whose work is the tangible evidence of the university’s success. For that reason, UAL was loath to assign a restrictive brand to its constituent colleges. Lippa says that he understood the university as acting like parents and the colleges playing the part of “siblings with different personalities but linked through a common name.”

The design team alit upon a neutral Helvetica typeface and a black and white motif. Though critiqued for not being creative enough to represent an arts institution, the branding allows the individual colleges the freedom to customise their own identity and prohibits the UAL brand from impinging on students’ own creativity. Lippa says, “The whole rationale for the design solution was to create a platform for the work of the students and teachers. It was at the heart of what we needed to solve. The creativity was needed in their work not oursotherwise we would be having elements in conflict.”

Searle notes that the colleges identities can differ greatly. She says the rebrand requires the university to respond to a strict set of brand guidelines, while the colleges are required consistent use of their own logo, but can express their distinctiveness through their own take on the branding.

But the logo was only one step in the process. Aligning the university’s six colleges behind one brand involved extensive research into the structure of the institution. Moving Brands undertook interviews with stakeholders, creative industry professionals, alumni and held a series of workshops examining the future direction of the university.

In came Pentagram with a simple solution to an elaborate problem.

Now, instead of representing each college as a separate star, the UAL logo joins its sub-brands with a unified visual identity and a well placed colon. Lippa says the colon provides a pivotal link between the university and the colleges. With the qualityof the design taken care of, what remained was for UAL to present its new identity to its community, a purportedly tough bunch to please.

Searle says the brand was well-received, “We’re full of creatives who do this kind of work as a matter of their everyday lives. To have that general acceptance of the brand – and in some cases to have people who actually like it, that’s quite a feat.”

Had the branding not been accepted, UAL ran the risk of a fate worse than derision: indifference. Due to the structure of the organisation – with the university brand acting as an institutional umbrella – students and staff could have ignored the rebrand. Each college has its own marketing and communications budget and could have staged a sort of branding coup. However, due to research and strategic implementation, the UAL rebrand is thriving.

The new brand is intended to provide a voice of authority and an overall structure of support for each college. While prospective students are attracted by the specific reputation of the college to whichthey apply, a strengthened university-wide brand can help when recruiting internationally.

“In international markets, the university is more strongly known than the colleges because, when we started to recruit there, we were doing it as a university,” Searle says. “There are many things you can do as a university that you can’t do as a college.”

Though the strength of the rebrand is allowed to shine through on the international market, at home, students are embracing the revamped logo, too. The Helvetica wordmark is cropping up on students’ work and the colleges have adopted it and adapted it to suit their personalities. The rebrand has, according to Searle, allowed students to become part of the UAL family.

While the rebrand has visually unified the university, physical changes have been undertaken as well. The colleges have redeveloped their joint initiatives and have begun instituting cross-college courses and creative work. Internal structures and communications have begun to support this extended collaboration. The next step, Searle says, is a website that reflects the brand values unveiled last autumn.

Progress for UAL began with an idea – the implementation of a simple identity that inherently embraces and fosters the university’s creativity. “There is a tendency within organisations to think we want something elaborate,” Searle says, “The real skill is in creating something that is deceptively simple.”

University of the Arts Helsinki

For a Finnish arts organisation comprised of three separate institutions, finding a new identity could have been a bit of a maze. Fortunately for the University of the Arts Helsinki, X marked the spot.

The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Sibelius Academy – a music centre – and Theatre Academy Helsinki were to be united under the University of the Arts brand. The rebrand is intended to raise the profile of the university and to ensure that it has “a significant

role in the development of Finnish society,” according to the team behind the rebrand.

The university partnered with design agency Bond to develop an original visual identity for the newly coalesced arts institutions. What emerged was a monochrome, all-caps bold typeface. The real ingenuity, however, came in the application of the underloved, third-to-last letter of the alphabet. X gets its chance to shine in the logo of the University of the Arts Helsinki as it provides a framework upon which the wordmark can be applied.

Bond and the university say, “The bold symbol “X” forces the audience to reflect on the significance of art and arts education. It can be thought of as symbolising a starting point and a destination, a meeting point, the location of treasure, a signature, something unknown, a warning, a question, or a solution.”

The branding allows each academy’s name to be applied along variations of the main logo’s X framework, adding a separate distinctness into a uniform identity. Implemented in both English and Finnish, the four logos occupy the same space while retaining enough individuality to effectively represent the university’s three distinct sub-brands. This was done intentionally as the colleges each have a strong reputation in Finland and in the art world.

“The symbol consists of two elements: the “X”- sign that unites all three academies and an individual logotype for each academy,” the teams says. “All the logotypes are designed with the same style. So the three academies become like siblings. The elements can be used together or separately, and they can come in various sizes. The plain and powerful “X”-sign is a connecting element.”

Though the new branding makes siblings out of strangers, it also allows the freedom for those siblings to express their own identities within the university umbrella. The brand architecture was left with room for each academy to develop upon and for students’ art to be implemented within the branding. “The starting point for the planning of the visual identity was to differentiate the University of the Arts Helsinki from both academic universities and arts institutions. As it is impossible to condense art into one symbol, the groups wanted the identity to suit different purposes. Thedesign team also wanted to avoid the clichés often attached to art: Art cannot be described with a single symbol or character.”

Finding the X, however, was not the end of the journey for the new branding. The rebrand in this case attempted to create a visual identity for a brand that had not previously existed. Implementing not only a new logo, but a new brand to three educational institutions required open-mindedness, research and a healthy dose of change to come into effect.

The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture had instituted new objectives that meant the three academies would have to unite. But the separate schools’ branding was dropped in the process as it was both unmemorable and was not central to of each academy’s reputation. “As a result, we decided to be brave and to forget the academies’ previous visual identities but to stick to the well-known names.”

The research and development stage involved the rectors of each academy, representatives from the student unions, the head of communications and the design team at Bond. Once the selected identity was narrowed down from three options, it was presented in an open forum in September 2012.

The new visual identity faced some opposition from the university community, both in response to the merger of three formerly unconnected academies and to the branding itself. The design team says, “Art universities are quite challenging environments for rebranding – some students are opposed to the whole idea of branding and many members of the community have strong opinions and passions.”

But, the future is promising for the newly-minted University of the Arts Helsinki as its branding is rolled out across Helsinki itself and the various academy properties. Though the X marked the end of the design journey, those behind the branding have not reached the end of the road just yet. “The new identity will be applied into many different applications and areas during 2013,” they say. “Guidelines and tools for managing the brand are also being developed at the moment. The most important thing for the new brand is to stay true to it’s vision: The most interesting university in Finland.”

Head to head

A Chatham House and Guardian debate on the importance of branding and marketing in the university marketplace found that sub-brands tend to harken back to the university’s central branding and resist change. But the university must assert itself visually to retain a strong position in the ever- expanding education market. Logos, it says, are not enough. The university must be able to define its position in the market. It must also point to its central brand as the symbol of its offer to prospective students.

The University of the Arts Helsinki has implemented new branding that is visually compelling, but more importantly, that solidifies its place in Europe’s arts education landscape. The separate academies are allowed their moment to shine, thereby attracting students based on reputation and quality of education, while the central branding provides an overarching visual framework.

The University of the Arts London similarly reincorporated its sub-brands into the central identity. However, its achievement was in redefining the university’s own stance in the marketplace. Translating an unmemorable logo to an emphatic, bold identity, the university has literally stamped its name on the arts scene in the United Kingdom. Both of these universities were faced with the question of incorporating sub- brands into a central institutional structure both physically and visually during the rebranding process. Both implemented a brand architecture that could be easily adapted to suit the varying characters of its constituent academies, thereby providing the freedom artists require to express themselves.

With a simple colon and a bold X, the University of the Arts London and the University of the Arts Helsinki have redefined both their visual and reputational presence in the world of arts education.