Our concept was a slightly oversized, non-standard trim, perfect bound book with a design motif that made heavy use of white space and organic, architectural angles borrowed from the Peter B. Lewis building’s interior. We named the book The Weatherhead Collection as a reference to both the book’s content as a collection of Weatherhead stories and the school’s physical location in Cleveland’s cultural hub, the University Circle neighborhood that is home to many museums and educational institutions.
We chose a paper stock that offered the brightest white in the market and secured a buy-in from the mill to offset the paper costs. For the text, we selected the Helvetica typeface to play off of the white space and openness of the design and convey a modern, European feel. The marketing team decided to display the five presented concepts for one week in one of the classrooms and invited selected faculty and staff to view the concepts and submit comments. The invited reviewers chose our concepts nearly unanimously and we were tasked with producing the first issue in the fall of 2008.
During the design process, we were asked to roll the new publication’s brand and the associated aesthetic into other school collateral and, before the first edition was complete, the school engaged ‘peeps to apply the brand developed for The Weatherhead Collection to the entire school.
As of January 2010, the rebrand is nearly complete and consists of more than a dozen brochures and catalogs, three separate ongoing ad campaigns, many direct mail pieces, and several website designs across at least seven separate school programs.
Lessons:
The rebranding of the Weatherhead School of Management has been very successful and we would love to use it as a study in the best way to conduct this sort of exercise, but the reality is that the process was done exactly backwards. Applying an aesthetic and brand developed to support a single product to an entire organization is a major challenge and we quickly learned that each office and each program within the school has its own demographic needs and not every situation is easily covered by our original brand rationale.
We believe that our ongoing experience with Weatherhead demonstrates our singular ability to apply a unified brand promise across many sometimes-disparate sub-entities. Through the adaptive application of an aesthetic that was not necessarily developed to speak to a particular audience and by massaging unique content to support the larger brand message, we’ve successfully re-branded a top-tier business school and caught the eye of the larger university. (Which has used the new Weatherhead brand standard as an inspiration for the whole university’s new brand standards that they’ve applied for the first time, fittingly, to a new University-wide publication called Think).
