Plymouth Marjon University needed a recognisable and consistent visual signature across all its employability comms – whether they come from the careers service, or from
Academic departments. The Futures brand needed to conform to the spirit of the University's brand guidelines, while allowing for the fact that the guidelines allow for a degree of innovation, where appropriate and impactful. 

Futures offers a personalised, student-centred approach to employability, tailor-made to each student. In common with other University Careers Services, Futures places a healthy focus on employability, and offers support and guidance to everyone that comes through its doors (and even those that don’t). But there’s one crucial belief that shines through: They believe that life’s an adventure, and that the key to happiness is finding a career that you love.

The brand's tone is conversational, informal and quirky. The visual identity is distinctive and eye catching – with messages that follow suit. Sometimes be seen as ‘the underdog’, beneath the surface Marjon is bold and confident – encapsulated in the Futures messaging: ‘I Am Marjon’. Marjon students are determined to succeed, and the Futures team helps to make that happen.

Explore IE's other rebranding work with university careers services.

For over 50 years, Agapé UK has been inspiring people to discover Jesus together, at home, at work, at university, and abroad. As the UK arm of an international Christian charity, active in over 190 countries, they're bringing people together and transforming lives.

IE originally worked with Agapé back in the 90s, when we were first founded. We're delighted to have rekindled that relationship to rebrand the charity and create a modern new website.

Aston Careers + Placements service offers students careers advice and placement opportunities to help them best prepare for life after university.

Aston Careers, Placements and Employability (as it was then known) was already a sector-leading, highly successful service, but they recognised that they were suffering from poor brand recognition and inconsistent campaigns. IE Brand was tasked with creating a distinctive brand identity.

We developed an urban, edgy visual style and arresting statements to engage students at a highly emotive level. The work drove an 84.5% increase in attendance at The Placements Fair and was Highly Commended for Best Use of a Visual Property at the Transform Awards Europe 2015. 

We've also worked closely with Aston as part of our work on the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme. 

Read more about Aston's Careers + Placements brand or explore IE's other rebranding work with university careers services.

The University of Liverpool is a Russell Group university, ranked in the top 1% for research worldwide. The university’s aim is to support students to become highly employable, creative, and culturally rich graduates and enable them to become agents for change.

The University of Liverpool Careers & Employability plays a key role in this, but were finding it a challenge to engage undergraduates, postgraduate students and internal university colleagues. With the service also set to relocate on campus, the time was right to signal change, increase visibility and promote involvement.

Following an initial brand audit, IE Brand created a new brand messaging and a visual identity that conveys the personalised, student-centred service on offer and captures the Liverpool students’ unique personality.

Explore IE's other university careers services rebrands.

We're working with Maynooth University to create a compelling brand for their careers service.

Morley Radio is the community radio station for Morley College London. It is central to the College’s vision of inspiring ambitions and creating outstanding learning opportunities.

Following a 'light touch' UX exercise to understand who the site's users would be, IE Digital created a visual design theme for the new website, inspired by the College's parent brand and current design trends, including a new logo for Morley Radio.

We then built a rich, modern and highly polished WordPress template and incorporated programme listings, podcasts and the all-important audio player – to allow users to live stream an eclectic selection of music, talk and drama, all created by students, staff and visitors in the College's state-of-the-art radio studios.

Read more about the Morley Radio website.

Scripture Union is a global charity working in over 140 countries. Light is SU’s market leading range of resources for children and youth, consisting of 5 kids’ and 4 leaders’ magazines, distributed throughout the English-speaking world. 

Scripture Union wanted to re-establish themselves as market leaders, so they came to IE Brand to rename and rebrand the product range. We created brand communication guidelines for the magazines, plus new age-specific sub brands for each of the 5 children’s magazines. 

We provided the in-house design and web teams with new templates, style guidelines and graphical assets with which to manage the identity.

The charity, The Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham, is involved in education through two independent schools, five free grammar schools and a sponsored academy, via the management of historic land assets which were passed on to it from as long ago as 1552.

Keen to take a lead on new inclusion legislation, the charity commissioned IE Brand to create an advertising campaign and collateral to encourage parents and children from underprivileged backgrounds to consider applying for a place in one of the Foundation's eight schools. Using beautiful location photography and cutting edge CGI, IE created the 'Opening Doors' campaign where a historic school doorway appears to 'land' in familiar playgrounds and high streets, inviting local communities to enter a brighter future.

Read more about the Opening Doors campaign. 

Sport England advises, invests in and promotes community sport to create an active nation. As part of the build up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, they wanted to get two million people more active in sport. 

Sport England was specifically struggling to deliver £15 million worth of grants into the hands of their ‘hard to reach’ target groups: disabled people, lower socioeconomic groups, young people and black and ethnic minority groups. Research showed that the application process was complex and inaccessible to all but educated, proficient form fillers. 

IE created a workshop style, facilitated process where sports groups were led through the application process by a community leader, helping with everything from opening a bank account to progress checklists and scoring systems for self evaluation. As a result, Sport England saw a significant improvement in the diversity of applicants, and their success rates improved too.

MSDUK is the UK’s leading non-profit membership organisation driving inclusive procurement. It promotes an ethos of diversity and inclusion in public and private sector supply chains, by identifying and introducing innovative and entrepreneurial ethnic minority owned businesses (EMBs).

Every year MSDUK runs a three-day global supplier diversity / inclusive procurement event attended by delegates from all over the world, which culminates in a prestigious award ceremony. IE Brand has twice worked with MSDUK to create a cohesive event concept for the evening, including art direction of the 'shortlisted candidates' film. Concepts have included 60s pop art inspired comic book superheroes to world music.

ISEAL is the global membership organisation for ambitious, collaborative and transparent sustainability systems. ISEAL is driving collective efforts to tackle the most pressing sustainability issues and create a world where Markets are a force for good.

ISEAL employed IE's brand and digital teams to create a campaign brand to encourage consumers to 'challenge the label'. The Challenge the Label microsite helps consumers distinguish between credible and non-credible sustainability claims – improving educated decision-making by leading people through the key questions in understanding a claim or label.

Read more about IE's digital work for ISEAL.

OCN London is a national not-for-profit organisation that creates and awards qualifications. Their mission is to help create a fairer society where everyone, whatever their educational background, has an opportunity to benefit from learning, realise their potential and fulfil their goals. 

IE Brand has repositioned OCN London as a distinctive, values driven, educational charity operating within a crowded, fluid and highly competitive marketplace. We defined a new proposition, audience-specific messages, tone of voice – and refreshed their visual identity and brand guidelines in line with the new position.

LABC (Local Authority Building Control) delivers building control through local authorities in England and Wales. They have a network of over 3,500 professional surveyors who provide efficient expert advice, upholding a public service ethos and work alongside Trading Standards, Environmental Health and other partners to deliver safer buildings. As a membership organisation, LABC also provides CPD, training and guidance to some 3,000 industry professionals.

The LABC brand was authoritative and functional, but they wanted to be bolder, and more compelling to other audiences beyond their membership. They wanted to become more front-facing, to increase awareness amongst the general public and educate homeowners about what building control is and why it’s important.

IE Brand created a bolder, more flexible visual identity and messaging, which provides a platform to establish LABC as the voice of building control in the industry, as well as raising its profile among homeowners. We delivered a wealth of templates, with an artwork creation system to assist the in-house marketing team, plus a beautiful new website.

Read more about refreshing the LABC brand. 

Universities West Midlands is a membership association for the thirteen Universities and University Colleges in the West Midlands.

The West Midlands Higher Education Association (WMHEA) – as they was then known – wanted to reposition themselves as the partner of choice for those seeking to engage with these universities.

IE Brand won the tender to carry out the brand work, going on to develop a new name, visual identity and rigorous brand guidelines document. We supported these with a content managed website, web tools, printed marketing materials and exhibition collateral.

Kings Foundation gets children active, having fun and learning together. They operate activity camps for children, create activity jobs for young people and provide people, programmes, training and resources to individuals and organisations that work with children.

The Digital Innovation Unit is an award winning not-for-profit service, born from the NHS. Their impartial, evidence-driven team of sector-leading digital specialists do groundbreaking work, developing innovative digital solutions to improve health and care, and transform the NHS.

NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit (CSU) asked IE Brand to help them create a new brand for the Unit. We needed to simplify their offering and make it more accessible, while conveying their team's expertise and passion for the NHS. It needed to appeal to commissioners and providers in healthcare, as well as future audiences including: Government, networks and universities/think tanks.

The resulting brand messaging and visual identity conveys the Digital Innovation Unit's visionary, disruptive and rigorous approach, as well as bright, empathetic, and trustworthy personality. It's professional and credible, but still relaxed and informal.