Rady School of Management Re-brand

Rady School of Management
Re-brand

The Rady School, ranked as the top business school in San Diego and amazing beach-adjacent location was hidden under ambiguous branding and a separate visual identity from the rest of the UC San Diego campus.

Brand Discovery | Logo Audit | Visual Guidelines | Collateral Creation

Brand Discovery

Background

Rady School of Management is the business school on the UC San Diego campus; a fact that many prospective applicants didn’t know before their admissions informational interview. The non-profit structure of the school also led to challenges with brand consistency since the Marketing team was small and many departments created their daily materials from inconsistent brand guidelines and templates.

Insight

Through listening to Admission’s challenges, other department’s requests for templated materials and seeing many inconsistent uses of the Rady School brand, it was clear the school needed a rehaul of the brand and clear guidelines to communicate to others in the Rady community.

Goals

Create a visual partnership with the UC San Diego campus.
A logo change to make “UC San Diego” legible at minimum size.
Champion for brand consistency through brand guidelines that the Rady community could use as reference.

Logo Audit

When comparing against other UC schools and their business school counterparts, there was a direct visual similarity with their logos. Since feedback from Admissions was that most applicants didn’t realize that Rady was part of UC San Diego a logo change was requested through main campus.

New Logo

Visual Guidelines

Streamlined visual guidelines influcened by the UC San Diego brand were compiled in an easy-to-reference brand guideline.

Brand elements Included:

Logo guidelines for the new logo change
Adopting UC San Diego’s typeface, Brix Sans
Streamlined color choices that complimented the UC San Diego color scheme
Creation of the triangle graphic, similar to the UC trident, but a nod to the Rady Building
Photography guidelines focusing on natural sunshine to communicate the sunny San Diego weather.
A sub-brand for Executive Education

Putting it all together

Executive Education Sub-Brand

Rady School offers professional development courses and certificate programs to working professionals, an audience that is older than prospective grad students. A secondary, jewel-toned color palette was introduced as a solution.