Our Brand Refresh; The FindAUniversity Journey Continues. . .

The ‘problem’

The compass has featured in our brand identity for nearly a decade, but we felt that we were lacking cohesion across our range of brands, products, and campaigns, and that more consistency and modernisation could improve brand recall, increase marketing effectiveness, and build a trusted community for both our student audience, and higher education professionals.

We also wanted our in-house design and marketing teams to have a solid framework to empower them to deliver high-quality design output, building confidence, efficiency and autonomy all whilst giving the brands and our campaigns consistency and impact across all touchpoints in the student and customer journey.

We wanted students using our services to know that whether they are at one of our study fairs, browsing our websites, asking for advice on our forums, submitting a scholarship competition entry, or even nominating their favourite PhD supervisor for an award, it was us that they were engaging with.

And for higher education professionals, we wanted to make sure whether they are engaging with insights, attending a webinar, speaking at a conference, exhibiting at a study fair, receiving an award, opening our monthly newsletter, meeting an account manager, or making a purchase; that they know that all those products and services are being provided by the one company.

As of 2021, FindAUniversity is part of Keystone Education Group, and we needed to leverage and reflect this change too.

The solution

Enter Pavement Creative, a Sheffield-based design agency headed by David Wood:

“From the outset of this project, we understood the need to create a developed brand identity that reflected the growth, modernity, and ambition of the business.

With a long-established brand, it was important that we recognised its place amongst its users and customers, and that we also are clear that the brand isn’t standing still.

Through our early-stage creative development, it became clear that our ultimate solution was right there in front of us! The key elements of the existing brand for us included the compass and the ‘FindA’ name, two distinctive features of the current brand.

Our solution took these two features and simplified them and brought them into a single stronger feature, enabling us to use the ‘A’ as our compass.

This also allowed us to develop the brand with more consistency over the brand architecture of different products, events and offerings.

We built on this with a cleaner and modern font family, and an ‘electrified’ colour palette that we felt was more reflective of ‘digital’ brands.

These core brand assets are then brought together using a new set of visual identity guidelines which will help the internal team create campaigns and content with more consistency and ease. This will lead to a greater sense of ‘brand’ when speaking to the various audiences, as they will have a greater familiarity with the brand over time.

We’re very proud of the outcome of this work. It is always rewarding to work on projects that feel ‘right’ from the early stages of dropping on an idea, to seeing it executed as you originally envisaged”.

Next steps

Pavement’s work has gifted us a refreshed logo that nods to the original and has embedded it at the heart of each of the brands. They have modernised and rationalised our colour palettes whilst staying true to the core colours which have been with us for 20 years, and built a brand architecture to reflect who we have been, who we are today, and who we aspire to be in the future.

We can’t wait for the full roll out and associated ‘swag’, and of course we’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you’re a fan of social media, we’d love you to connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram where you will see more of the refreshed brand creatives in action.