We have begun a piece of work to strengthen Imperial’s brand.

Building our international brand will help us compete on a sustainable basis in the very top tier internationally. It’s at the heart of the ambition and vision we are setting through our new institutional strategy. Our own community, through the recent strategy consultation, signalled a clear desire to bolster our reputation and get Imperial the recognition it deserves.

The Imperial Brand Project responds to this. The aim is to ensure our brand (how we present ourselves, verbally and visually) reflects Imperial’s ambition and vision, helps us communicate effectively with our audiences, and differentiates us from our competitors.

Imperial is a fantastic institution, delivering world-changing impact. This is about telling our story with even greater clarity, confidence and impact.

The project will be supported by a Project Board, a Working Group, and a Critical Friends Group and we will be working with the design studio, Pentagram.

Project timeline

Between now and December, the Imperial Brand Project will cover:

• Research and discovery (interviews, survey, and focus group sessions to understand our challenges and opportunities)
• Developing a brand proposition (something that captures and articulates Imperial’s purpose, vision and differentiators)
• A review of our brand identity system (including logo, typeface and colour palette)
• The development of a brand toolkit (the guidelines and assets needed for long-term delivery and management of the brand)

The research and discovery phase is now underway. When this initial phase is complete, the community will be consulted on the brand identity in the autumn, with the final guidelines shared in early 2024.

This work will be closely aligned with the website redesign project.

How to get involved

The success of this project will depend on the involvement of our whole community. We will engage with staff, students, alumni, and other key stakeholders throughout and share information about the project on this webpage.

The research and discovery survey and focus groups have now closed. Many thanks to our staff, students and alumni who participated in these – we received 2,000 responses to the survey and engaged with over 40 staff and students through the focus groups. We are now analysing the responses, and we will report on this phase of the project within the next month and share next steps.

 

Using our existing brand? We need your help!

We're asking staff to please share information on how you use the current brand  (for example: flyers, posters, slides, social media graphics, banners for events, departmental brochures, merchandise) – or would like to use it in the future – through this short form. This will help us plan and prepare tools for the implementation of the brand from December early 2024.

Ultimately, we want to provide tools and resources that will be most useful to you in your area of work, whether that’s a platform to design and produce high quality materials for print and digital use (similar to Canva), Microsoft Office templates, or access to a range of files and resources. We’ll be exploring possibilities and will report back to the community in the coming months. 

Any questions?

If you have any questions about the project, please submit them via our contact form.