There’s almost nothing you opinionated marcomms folk love more than passing judgment on a new logo and the Media Design School’s bright and explosive brand makeover is quite the departure from its former black and white identity.
With the old logo remaining unchanged for over 10 years, the school wanted to ensure the new logo did justice to the school’s creativity, variety and vitality. Working in collaboration with brand strategy and communications agency Origami, Media Design School’s marketing manager Darron Leslie says the original plan was to use a style guide, font family and colour palate that worked with the existing Media Design School logo.
“This shifted upon exploration with our agency Origami of ‘what really made us tick’ to be a more expansive analysis of brand strategy and architecture and to fully articulate our brand essence, promise and personality,” he says.
The new logo features a spark, which Leslie says represents the essence of the school’s brand—to “ignite creativity”.
But just how the spark got all of its multicoloured spikes is an interesting story in and of itself, stemming from a desire to include and collaborate with the school staff because, as Leslie puts it “they would have to live the brand as well”. That collaboration resulted in each staff member being asked to submit an image that inspired them.
“These images were then utilised as a gradient ‘fill’ in the spark brand-mark, with four iterations representing a family of spark logos reflecting how our creativity, diverse course structure and the many different people and cultures that come together on a daily basis make Media Design School truly inspiring.”
With the school comprised of 40
staff from different backgrounds, Origami’s Andy Haines says the collaboration was inevitably going to be an interesting one.
“By getting everyone involved they became part of the creative process and the identity was ‘curated’ rather than ‘thrust upon the institution by a design agency’. The consequence of this buy-in was extraordinary and started countless interactions about the nature of identity and how the school and its competitors look.”
Leslie says the family of spark logos offers flexibility, with different versions used for different mediums of communication, like print, online and corporate communications.
The school’s subject areas of Graphics, Interactive, 3D, VFX Motion Design, GameDev and The AdSchool also each have their own sub-brand comprised of subtle variations on the main parent logo spark.
“The re-design allowed for a suite of sub-brands to help better articulate the specialised design and visual art disciplines that make up the Media Design School product,” says Leslie.
Below are some of the images submitted by staff and used in the logo.