Imperial's stakeholders give its rebrand a design critique
A month after its launch, let's colour in the missing details and find out if their rebrand still works
A month ago, I wrote about Imperial College London’s newly launched rebrand:
Lots of questions remained, including how the logo would be received and how it would nestle into the updated brand guidelines.
We now have some answers.
The new logo has received a lot of backlash. A petition of 8,055 signatures (at time of writing) is calling for the university to pause the rollout of this new branding and hold a wider consultation with students.
From what I can see, the backlash centres around three concerns:
That reducing the logo to just the word ‘Imperial’ carries risk,
That the logo is too corporate, ugly, or childish,
And that there was insufficient consultation with students during its design and approval process.
Let’s take each point in turn.
Concern 1: the word ‘Imperial’ in isolation
I’ll be honest. My article from last month was originally titled “Rebranding Imperial into a household name”. But I was concerned what someone seeing the title alone would think it was about, even if they were familiar with the university.
The university reported on their links to the British Empire a few years ago, long before this new logo came into being. The concern now is that taking the context of ‘College London’ out of the logo risks making the university look like they’re actively promoting that aspect of their history.
So, while a month ago I thought that this slimmed down logo would help the university build its brand in areas outside of higher education, I think the risk outlined above outweighs these potential benefits.
So, unless they were considering a complete renaming, I think a better approach than an isolated ‘Imperial’ logo would be double down on a single, more distinctive ‘I’ symbol. That way they could continue to use that symbol in the same way they do now, in social media profile pictures and other applications. And it would be complemented by the full ‘Imperial College London’ name on the website and print publications.
Concern 2: simultaneously minimalist and maximalist
I’ve heard a few times that the logo looks like it was created in a few seconds in Microsoft Word. And therefore little effort must have been put into its design.
This criticism is understandable. Today, popular software like Word come with such a variety of fonts that it’s not hard to quickly recreate text-only logos (a.k.a. ‘wordmarks’) that are free of ornamentation, like Imperial’s.
But a ‘minimalist’ end product doesn’t mean that the design process was minimalist too. There is real work in crafting simplicity from a starting point of complexity.
Now, that’s not always the case. Without having taken part in the design process, it’s hard to tell how much work went into arriving at the end result. So the more important question is whether the end result solves the ‘problem’ of the university needing an updated brand. I talked more about how I think it does and it doesn’t in my previous post.
In parallel to concerns about the logo being too simple, there are concerns that the colour palette is the opposite; what some might call ‘maximalist’. While I’m not keen on the pairing of bright green on ‘Imperial Blue’ as seen in their launch video and original icon (since changed to white on blue), a separate showreel demonstrates that the palette is flexible enough to be used in toned down ways too.
Concern 3: not enough stakeholder input
A key skill in a designer’s toolkit is finding the happy midpoint between the two notorious extremes of ‘design by committee’ and ‘design by individual taste’.
Many argue that this new logo is the result of leaning too much towards the latter, and are calling for more student input before continuing the new brand rollout.
It’s not that the project team didn’t consult students at all. There were two phases where they sought their input. 308 students responded to a survey during the research phase, and 350 students responded to a feedback survey on the initial creative work. Not knowing the overlap, these figures sum to at most 3% of the student population (according to the last available official data). There’s an argument that that’s not a high enough proportion, and that the response rate would have been higher had the university attached the new logo to the feedback solicitation email itself rather than linking out to a video.
The process of gathering design feedback can always be improved. In parallel to its formal emails and feedback forms, the university could have put their finger on the pulse of the student population by showing the proposed branding at the start of lectures and asking for feedback there and then. Or they could have gone analogue and put together an exhibition of the proposals, along with paper feedback forms that could remain anonymous for more candid responses.
In closing
To risk sounding blasé, there is every chance that, with time, people will just ‘get used’ to this new branding. Not because it’s perfect, but because the tension that comes with anything new eventually dissipates. There are valid concerns about the logo that I think need to and can be addressed. More channels for design feedback could have been established, and it’s potentially not too late to do that.
Either way, Imperial just needs to double check whether their rebrand works for them, given their unique story, their ambitions, and the needs of their diverse stakeholders.
Otherwise they might end up with two logos!