From fragmentation: How 24 identities became one Imperial
Marketing conference MAD//Fest returned to London in July, braving the heat with a curated line-up of speakers, marketers and industry voices that focused on this year’s theme of The Human Touch.
In their talk, Imperial College London’s Head of Brand, Abby Bolt, and Bobby Burrage, Creative Director at The Click, tackled the question of how you design a brand for an entire university – one that had to give 24 departments and three faculties their own bespoke identity, while still speaking as one coherent Imperial to a community of 30,000 people.
Bolt and Burrage shared their journey transforming Imperial’s brand over the past two years – an endeavour that built on the foundations of Imperial’s 2024 rebrand, developed in partnership with Pentagram and Simple Revolution.
Fragmentation to distinction
Before the 2024 rebrand, Imperial’s brand system was still clinging to its 1990s roots, struggling to keep pace with the institution’s evolution.
As Bolt recalled: “Fragmentation was rife. Departments were going rogue.” Across the university, separate identities had emerged for departments, research groups, student groups, and professional teams. Instead of a single, cohesive brand, it more closely resembled a collection of disconnected expressions. “Everyone was solving their own problems in isolation. Different visual languages, different tones, different interpretations of Imperial.”
Tackling this head-on and achieving consistency among these varied departments was only one part of the challenge; Imperial and The Click also needed to demonstrate why their visual identity mattered to academics – those whose reputations were built on their work: research, discovery, and publication – not on marketing campaigns.
“We weren’t trying to convince them to like the brand. We were trying to convince them that it mattered at all,” says Bolt.
Competing with doubt
That question of mattering extends beyond Imperial’s walls. Higher education has been grappling with financial constraints coupled with growing public scepticism about the value of a degree. As Bolt points out, in this climate, standing out matters more than ever: “We’re not just competing with each other anymore. We’re competing with doubt.”
Where universities lean on familiar visual cues – heritage, tradition, and safe signals of credibility – Imperial aimed to break the mould. Progressive, science-led, and future-facing, its goal was to express its own character, rather than borrow the visual languages of respected institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. Being labelled the “MIT of Europe” might feel like a compliment, but it cast a shadow that Imperial was keen to step out of. The shift focused on “owning what makes Imperial, Imperial,” cultivating a brand that could hold its own without blending in.
That established the central creative tension, says Bolt: “We needed to create something distinctive enough to stand out, but flexible enough that 24 departments would see themselves in it.”
24 clients, one brand
Meeting that tension meant starting with the departments themselves. The Click kicked off their investigation by engaging with every department, diving deep into conversations with scientists, engineers, medics, and top-tier academics. In practice, Burrage explains that the team was, essentially, managing relationships with 24 individual clients – each with its own personality, priorities, opinions, and agenda – while protecting the coherence of the university-wide brand. Those conversations, he notes, were crucial in shaping the identity itself – giving The Click direct insight into how each department saw its own place within Imperial, and ensuring buy-in from the outset rather than after the fact.
“This wasn’t a brand problem that we were going to be able to solve from the outside. We had to build it from within.”
Their brief could be summed up in a few simple words: “Bespoke but coherent; individual but unified.”
The design system: I as We
There’s no ‘I’ in team – but for Imperial, the collective output of this collaboration started with exactly that.
The new visual shorthand for Imperial takes the form of a bespoke wordmark, and the letter “I” as a leading visual motif that could represent both the institution and the individuals within it. The team developed the idea of “I as We” – a pluralised “I” – which captured the essence of balancing personal identity with collective belonging.
Visually, Burrage notes, “there was something wonderfully simple about this I, in terms of its modularity, its symmetry – both horizontally and vertically.”
From this foundation, The Click created 24 individual “creative I’s,” one for each department, with several guiding principles shaping the development:
- Evocative rather than literal. Aeronautics did not need wings, just as the National Heart and Lung Institute did not need an anatomical illustration – the goal was to evoke a feeling, not depict a subject.
- Simple and scalable. Every identity worked in one colour and at multiple sizes, easing rollout and production.
- Individual but related. Rather than being designed in isolation, the identities were repeatedly reviewed together as a complete family.
- Balanced. The team checked for duplication of shapes, line work, density, and visual forms. “At every stage, on every creative I, as they got updated and refined, we kept putting them back up on the wall,” Burrage recalls.
- Dynamic. Motion was considered throughout – how each identity could rotate, transition, and come to life digitally.
From here, the creative I’s were expanded into all-over patterns and supergraphics. These added depth across applications, allowing the central “I” to step back when a more expressive treatment was needed.
Making it practical at scale
For a design system of this magnitude, Imperial needed to make it practical for thousands of people producing their own communications and materials. Frontify provided the templates, resources, and guidance needed to translate the creative idea into a scalable working system.
“We needed to leverage Frontify to be able to scale it out and make it practical to work through templates, resources, and clear creative guidance,” says Burrage.
Frontify gave departments the flexibility to adapt their individual identities while maintaining consistency with the wider Imperial brand – allowing all 24 departments to apply the system independently, without slowing each other down or compromising coherence.
Burrage adds that, behind the scenes, Frontify has “been critical in helping us make the system work at scale.”
Chosen, not mandated
That flexibility paid off in an unexpected way: the strongest proof of the project’s success was not just its launch or reception by the design press, but that departments began choosing to use their identities across merchandise, print, digital, and environmental applications. “It’s not mandated use,” Bolt notes. “It’s chosen use.”
As a result, the system has continued to grow and evolve as departments make it their own. It isn’t static — “it’s behaving like something that actually belongs to people.”
That sense of belonging was the intended outcome from the beginning: “What we really needed wasn’t compliance. We needed pride. We needed the departments to want to use the identity and not feel like they had to.”
Key to success
In their closing notes, Bolt and Burrage share that the project’s real success lies beyond visual identity: “In the end, this wasn’t just a design project. It really was an alignment project.” As Bolt puts it, “brand systems, I’ve learned over the years, don’t fail often because the design isn’t good enough. They fail because people don’t see themselves in them.” Imperial’s 24 identities work not because they were tightly controlled, but because the people behind them had a hand in making them.
“If you want coherence at scale, you don’t start with control. You start with ownership,” Bolt continues. “And when people feel ownership, they don’t just follow the brand. They build it with you.” For any organisation wrestling with brand at scale, that’s the real takeaway: the strongest systems aren’t the most tightly dictated or governed, but the ones people choose to make their own.