Randolph-Macon College

Story

Randolph-Macon College, a private four-year institution, is one of the oldest colleges in the commonwealth. The original Boydton campus was moved to Ashland, Virginia in 1868; the college went co-ed in 1971; and the campus and curriculum have grown to meet the current demand for the critical-thinking and professional skills employees require from recent graduates. With the addition of its first graduate program—Physician Assistant studies—the college continues to advance its mission of preparing its increasingly diverse student body for success after leaving campus.

Challenge

The marketing and communication function at the college had been housed under the Advancement office and therefore was focused mainly on alumni publications. Enrollment was the sole purview of the Office of Admissions. Meanwhile there was no centralized responsibility for the messaging or brand management.

With the impending demographic cliff in higher education, damage from the covid 19 pandemic, a visual identity that was last updated in 2006, and no centralized and consistent messaging, the college was in need of a brand platform that accurately surfaced the college’s value to prospective students and parents and gave the college a sorely needed set of messages and visual tools to stand out in a competitive market.

Opportunity

With a recognition for the need of broader scope for the marketing and communication function to include enrollment, digital marketing, and brand stewardship, the college elevated Marketing and Communication to its own function and added a member of cabinet. The new Vice President of Marketing and Communications began to reimagine the department and made a series of strategic hires to fulfill her charge, including myself as the new Creative Director to oversee the development of an updated visual identity. Along with Brent Hoard, the Senior Director of Digital Strategy, we collaborated to draw the scope of comprehensive re-brand project to include market research, brand platform, visual identity, and website.

Brand Theme: Up Close, Future Ready

The RMC brand theme encapsulates the promise the college makes to its students to deliver a highly personalized and hand-on educational experience that prepares them to meaningfully contribute to the communities and professions after they graduate. The two-pronged message also serves as a thematic structure for titles and headlines.

New Logo and Monogram

With my own previous experience as well as a year applying the Randolph-Macon cupola lockup, I knew the new logo needed to resolve a few challenges:

A modular, digital-first, flexible identity that wasn’t reliant on the fidelity to a lockup
An authentic, ownable icon that contributed to greater name recognition

The solution—a bespoke wordmark in a modern serif to convey both the deep roots of the institution and future-looking ambitions paired with an engraved monogram to increase adoption and recognition of the RMC shorthand.

Pathways

Elemental to the brand position is the concept of the pathways that RMC builds for students: between concepts in your classes; between your passions and what you will learn; between students and the community of alumni; even between Ashland, Virginia and points reachable along the Northeast Regional rail line. Visual tools—from the featured headline typeface to hashed rules evocative of railroad ties—give literal presence to the connections, both human and educational, that bind each student’s experience.

What We Learned Along the Way

Because the vast majority of offices and departments used the athletics logo for their own branding, I assumed adoption of the new logo and requests for unitmarks would be low and slow. No so! Plus, the applications of the unitmark ran counter to what I assumed, so the logo wasn’t designed with those applications in mind. We had to be willing to make exceptions and alterations that would allow those applications to work. I ended up adding marks for apparel specifically as well as informal applications, rather than have the community go rogue when the rules proved too strict.

“If you build it, they will come” may apply to a baseball field, but may not with new brand standards. A website replete with rules and tools, no matter how comprehensive or intentionally built, will not get the eyeballs you want. Were I to have done this project again, I would have offered more info sessions to actually present the tools and how to use them and to answer questions. Explanations for processes I took for granted—such as going from using a single lockup to using a modular logo system—would have benefited the community.

Successful rebrands stoke the appetite for more change. Though the athletics logo was originally not part of the project, we did open the door for an interim update to refresh the "Buzz" logo to improve readability. The process also benefitted an already-planned migration of the athletics website to Sidearm, where we optimized the opportunity to integrate some of the new college branding and draw visual linkages to athletics.