Cambridge School
New look for logo
Branding
Logo design
The old logo — As you will know if this is not the first page on our website you’ve read, Cambridge School is a language school with 9 sites for whom we’re running a branding strategy through their graphic campaigns. Through this we’ve managed to position their brand with top-of-mind awareness in its category. However, there was one task outstanding. Their logo was clearly improvable. Among the problems that had dragged on for over 20 years were a lack of legibility and the difficulty of reproducing it on some materials and media. All this meant it was an antiquated logo that no longer had any impact. So let’s go!
For many brands, the logotype is the signature that underwrites communication campaigns and it must convey values and attributes correctly and effectively.
A new brand icon —
Restyling a logo is always a harder job than creating a logo from zero. There are endless meticulous tasks to be performed. And as we are perfectionists, we left nothing untouched: typography, crest, heraldic elements, composition, variants and so on.
The brand icon of the Cambridge School is based on the crest of the town of Cambridge, which consists of several elements: two silver roses, a gold fleur-de-lys, a single-arch bridge topped with three towers and three boats with a mast and a furled sail. In the original, all these elements had become distorted, so the first job was to redraw them to make them understandable and usable in all kinds of sizes and media. We also stylised the shape of the shield so that these elements are contained in a better-composed space.
Better typography — The neglect and abuses suffered by the Cambridge School logo over the years had completely deformed it. This was particularly serious with the original typography, getting in the way of its legibility. The new typography is not only more modern but connects better with today’s audience without losing its academic character.
A harmonious whole — Finally, we adjusted the weight of all the elements so that the logo and brand icon would relate to one another in a more balanced way, visually in proportion, and even allow different compositions suited to uses and media not hitherto envisaged.
