The UOC was one of the world’s first online universities and is now a benchmark provider of e-learning with more than 20 years of experience. Coinciding with a change in strategy, the UOC decided to reorganize its brand structure to give the various areas of the university their own position within a shared brand ecosystem.
We were asked to design a brand architecture that would convey personality, allowing each area of the University to feel unique but feel consistent within the UOC brand. We needed to keep in mind that today’s paradigms are very different. Nowadays, students work as a group, are much more dynamic and do not understand platforms or fixed locations. The UOC thus needed to be dynamic and ubiquitous.
The design solution was to produce various flexible modular brands, allowing for the creation of a different and dynamic visual personality and a logo that seems to extend beyond these frameworks. We took advantage of the fortuitous opportunity that the letters U and C by could both be formed by cutting the letter O. This diagonally shaped composition allows for dynamic composition and is reminiscent of heraldry, so often used by universities.
This new brand proposes stepping out of established conventions, setting new boundaries and acting in a flexible but ordered fashion.
To complement the brand, we created an in-house serif and sans serif font family, a digitally native RGB color palette, a photography style, new visual resources and a pictographic system to match the logo. Taking into account the audiovisual environment in which the brand is also present, we decided to do more than just create the visual aspect and give it its own voice, creating a sound brand that consists of an audio logo and its own acoustic language, allowing the University to produce its own auditory brand in audiovisual applications.
For more information visit brand.uoc.edu
