A resilient new identity for an innovative London business school

The challenge

New City College is one of England’s largest colleges, rooted in its community with campuses across north-east London, and the largest college group to date to receive an ‘outstanding’ OFSTED rating.

After successfully tendering for the work, Sharp Sharp was commissioned to develop the brand strategy and brand identity for an important new venture from the college: Shoreditch Business School. Sharp Sharp was also commissioned to design the business school’s website. We partnered with PIE Code who planned and built the site, and worked closely with them throughout its production.

The brand would need to appeal to diverse local business communities, as well as the bigger and sometimes more corporate businesses which nestle close by the campus in Shoreditch.

As a new venture, the brand needed to build trust, establish relevance with its audience and be consistent in its messaging. A key challenge was to compete with the academic reputations of established business schools, which are often attached to universities.

Our solution

Strategy & Insight

We developed a selection of options for a guiding purpose for the brand. The one which clearly resonated the most revolved around “Building business resilience in a rapidly-changing world.” This reflects the fast-changing world of work as AI’s influence grows, and innovation-focussed areas such as sustainability courses which are a speciality of the school.

Using Sharp Sharp’s commercially-focussed BrandSeed system, we developed the purpose through conversations with key stakeholders of the business school and desk research. We first determined the top audience segments, and then developed value propositions before developing the brand purpose.

Execution & Deliverables

We delivered a comprehensive suite of materials:

Brand strategy: to help deliver on commercial aims through the branded materials, and to build emotional engagement with audiences.

Tone of voice guide: to ensure consistency in communications, and principles to help written materials engage with audiences while achieving commercial aims

Messaging guide: key pieces of ready to use messaging, a brand story and examples of how to communicate through the stages of the sales funnel

Visual identity: a comprehensive kit for creating branded communications, including logo (static and animated versions), hero image, illustrations, silhouettes, pictograms and patterns. Also guidelines covering colour, typography and iconography.

Brand application: designed templates and key ready-to-use documents, in order to make the crucial launch period run smoothly and provide everything needed by NCC’s marketing team to implement the brand in the future. These included: course catalogue, introductory presentation, social media templates featuring animation and video and infographics.

Visual identity

We always start with a discovery phase in branding projects. This uncovered a fascinating history around Shoreditch, which has a long tradition of rule-breaking. Its location outside the city walls meant there were less restrictions from authorities, so in puritan times the area became known for its theatre and entertainments. Shakespeare’s early plays were performed at a theatre near Curtain Road.

Desk research will only get you so far, and so Sharp Sharp’s Director Steve got on his bike to do some visual reconnaissance of the area. Shoreditch’s architecture became a key influence in the logo.

Logo

The logo represents the local communities around Shoreditch through the row of houses in the foreground, plus big business shown through the skyline behind this. On a more abstract level, the dynamic arrowheads point upwards to career progression and business growth.

Based on elements from the logo, the hexagonal graphic shapes within the visual identity are resilient, modern and distinctive.

The modern typeface, Uni Sans, is inspired by the style of Shoreditch’s tech and startup brands.

Illustrations

An idea from the concept stage, for elements to be layered to create graphic backgrounds and illustrations, formed the starting point for the brand illustration style. A modular graphic style was developed, incorporating elements which represent the key types of courses. This was layed out in a long master illustration, which can be cropped in myriad ways to produce unique images for courses, campaigns and more. There is a playful interplay between 2D and isometric 3D elements. This is enabled by the hexagonal graphic shapes in the graphic toolkit, which match the isometric angles.

A slightly simpler style was developed for pictograms, where space or brevity mean that a full illustration is not suitable.

And icon styling is included in the guidelines too, for when an even simpler graphic is needed.

Results

Since its launch, the business school has proudly brought the brand out into the wider world with confidence. Brand applications developed with the brand assets by NCC’s marketing team include a trade show stand, digital advertising and outbound sales materials. We look forward to hearing about how the brand grows as the school develops.