Education and Discovery

Client

University of Leeds

Project

Enterprise: Be Part of Something Extraordinary

Encouraging students to be part of something extraordinary at the Centre for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Studies.

Leeds Enterprise Centre has grown rapidly over the past few years; in staff, activity, and awareness across the University of Leeds campus as well as externally; nationally and globally. As a result of this growth the Enterprise Centre wanted to become more recognised as ‘the focal point of enterprise, education and research’, extending its reach further and improving access to resources and expertise. The Leeds Enterprise Centre was to be renamed The Centre for Enterprise & Entrepreneurship Studies.

With the change in name, Magpie were commissioned to provide a new identity; one that is fitting to the work of the centre, the activities and experiences. They wanted an identity that is current, attracting and engaging target audiences, and reflecting its values and personality.

The final solution presented was bold, inspiring and brought a refreshed energy to the Centre. It was focused around three different brand statements that appealed to different audiences.

The identity used a hand-rendered ‘e’ shape for ‘entrepreneurship’ that was free flowing in design to represent the creativity and new ideas that its audiences generate. The centre of the ‘e’ represented the enterprising community aspect of the Centre – a group of highly creative, unique and inspiring individuals, from a whole range of backgrounds, all bound together by entrepreneurship.

It was essential that we used an insight-led approach to understand what ‘current’ looked like to stakeholders. We developed the brief to ensure the visual identity was relevant to all audiences as well as understanding how we could make the brand flexible whilst adhering to University brand guidelines.

Based on the insight, we designed a range of concepts. At this stage some of the developments that the clients and stakeholders wanted were not in line with the overall University guidelines. It was important that we pushed creative boundaries to deliver client satisfaction; however we take our role as guardians of the University of Leeds brand seriously. Therefore we worked to mediate between our client and the Central Communications team to develop a solution that met both of their objectives, and gave an entrepreneurial and innovative solution within a corporate brand framework.

The work we did has given the Centre a unique identity within a crowded campus, which was the first step to achieving their objective of being recognised as ‘the focal point of enterprise, education and research’. The momentum has not stopped and the team, alongside the University’s Business Start Up Service, has recently won two highly prestigious awards:

The Duke of York Award for University Entrepreneurship

The Times Higher Education Entrepreneurial University of the Year

 

 

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