Leeds Metropolitan University was rebranding itself into "Leeds Beckett University" at a cost of £250,000 while maintaining it's logo, colours, etc. The university had changed it's logo 10 years ago without changing it's name; by comparision, this name change will have a bigger impact on it's students... I felt that not changing any of the branding is a missed opportunity to tie-in with this sea-change. What follows is my self-initiated brief, my final academic project, a final swansong to my university.
After many iterations, I've decided on making an entirely NEW typeface, eschewing the serifs and hence "tradition", as the name change represents the universities hopes for the FUTURE. I also avoided any of the university's "iconic buildings" as that would have identified with one campus and/or faculty over the rest.
The letterbox around the logo should at least be the half-width of the "modern b".
The "modern b" was my attempt at the alphabet b with as few strokes as possible, lowercase as a matter of understatement, we dont make ourselves "big".
Application on portrait-oriented media.
Application on landscape-oriented media.
A fictional namecard. Some of the mediums delivered had a "galactic overlay", to play on the "futurism" feel of this design.
This is my first attempt at creating my own typeface: "Beckett Neue".
Suggested colour pallete.
My gripe with the university's website is that it wasn't "responsive" or even "mobile friendly", for a university that boasts to care about it's students' future... it surely doesn't seem at all futureproofed. I've prepared a mockup website on a fully responsive homepage, made with Bootstrap + a few of my bespoke scripts.
Another gripe of mine was the "academic intranet" (the internal website used my lecturers and students in term-time), which was a mess.
The primary one called "X-Stream" (a cheesy name by old people trying to sound cool and relevant?) was based on Blackboard had too much visual inconsistency, frames, and had no features to allow student-to-student cmmunication (which was important to me in bringing together students from our disparate campuses and buildings scattered around Leeds).
The secondary one called "CAGD" is used by the Faculty of Arts, Environment, and Technology exclusively. It's meant to be a hybrid between Behance and Tumblr, and it does both of these terribly. There was also no way of receiving notifications of alerts and messages, or ways of properly connecting it's students and work groups (it tries, but the implementation wasn't perfect). It focused way too much on transfering a print-medium-style onto a digital screen, and seemed ptimized only for the massive screens of Macs around our faculty.
I address all the above with my mockup website that takes both of these academic intranets together.
I always thought a "progress bar" of some sort for our academic modules would have been cool. It would work better than waiting on sporadic lengthly textual reports every now and then from tutors. These progress bars could indicate whether we were expected to submit something at a given time, if we were "late", and acknowledgement that our work has been received.
#LongLiveLeedsMet
