Essex is a university for the brave, energetic and eager to learn – where ideas are shared, and initiative valued. Essex has never been about keeping quiet or towing the line. It’s about taking action. Making a difference. Creating change.
Collaborating closely with the Heads of both Brand Management and Communications, we created an outward-facing strapline that encapsulates this ethos, reflects the strategic pivot in the university’s journey and sets a clear positioning for the university for the next four years.
Simple yet bold, ‘Where Change Happens’ emphasises the adventurous attitude that has kept the university thriving for the past 60 years. It reflects the progress of its students and the real difference they make to research. It underlines Essex’s wider impact on the world around us.
To help communicate this, we modelled an intelligent ’60’ logo mark that pivots between itself and the university’s ‘E’. The removed squares create energy and signify change in static application. This nuance makes the logo mark distinctive and undeniably Essex, and takes the identity a step further into the world of digital.
Alongside the 60th campaign, we reviewed and evolved the Essex brand guidelines. An undertaking to enable the many internal teams to communicate with their vast set of stakeholders creatively, and consistently, across printed and digital touchpoints. For this, we established the strategic platform, ‘consistency through simplicity’, to get back to basics, and to set brand foundations for digital form.
We produced extensive digital guidelines, and a comprehensive set of 60th campaign identity guidelines. Together helping internal teams build an effective and memorable brand presence for Essex, and anything ‘60’!
The campaign identity was subsequently applied to campus signage artwork, video idents and brand templates to help build a memorable campaign across the 2023/24 and 2024/25 academic years.
“Ark’s team listened to our needs and vision, and through creative and strategic thinking, they worked out how to recognise our repositioning for the next four years in a visual way, set to a simple and clear campaign strapline of Where Change Happens – three words that really captures our ethos in a modern and relevant way for our audiences.
We love how they represented change graphically, in static form and wherever digital movement allowed. Across our campus and comms, the campaign was engaging and communicated very clear messages in the Essex way.
And critically for us, they managed multiple stakeholders, from the VC to the various comms teams, to sell in their solution and take it through to execution. All teams were excited to see the campaign go live, and were prepped and ready to use assets to push their messaging in a cohesive way.
An all-round very successful campaign.”
Carolyn Hunter
Head of Brand Management
