Reconsidering Solent

Southampton Solent University has rebranded. That’s a brave thing for a British HEI to do, not just in the midst of the diabolical perfect storm UK Higher Education is facing at the moment, but also given the reaction these things have received of late. Recent university rebrands (Portsmouth, Roehampton, Loughborough, Warwick) seem to have acted as a lightning-rod for discontent in those institutions. And in 2018 there is a lot for staff and students to be discontented about.

But I have to admit an interest here. Back in 2014 I helped Solent with their Brand Architecture and formed a great affection for the University and its people. Working with universities, you come to realise quite how individual each is, even though there are so many things about them that are similar. And at that moment Graham Baldwin had recently taken up the vice chancellorship and was driving through an ambitious new strategy. Solent was capitalising on its strengths, and moving up a gear. The old brand, with its quirky ‘spark’ logo and kids-in-beanie-hats image clearly wasn’t going to cut it for much longer.

I don’t want to launch into a criticism of the new brand but there are some lessons for Higher Education (and in a broader sense, for the UK branding industry) in what Solent has done. First, though, let me compliment them on the things they have done right. And in terms of brand strategy, they have made some bold and sensible decisions. That should go without saying, of course, but these days it is far more likely that an institutions will adopt a timid and ill-advised approach.

Right up at the top of the list of things they’ve done right is to ditch the ‘Southampton Solent University’ name and go for Solent. That’s what they’re known as. And that’s what their URL has been, for as long as URLs have been around. But it is not easy to make these decisions. Especially in a university, which is a complex and diverse community where there are always dozens of different voices with different points of view (and a thousand objectors to any change).

Next up, the extinguishing of the ‘spark’ has taken considerable courage. Having advised the University of Southampton to kill their dolphin a few years before, I know how much attachment there is to these symbols. And the spark was well known — university logos are rarely memorable, even to people who work in the sector, but this one was. However, ‘well known’ doesn’t mean that it had any real equity, or future.

In place of a logo plus symbol Solent have gone for a purely typographic approach. (Actually, that’s not quite true—their brand FAQ says that: “Visually, the new brand is built around a circle. This is a single, simple element, representing various things such as a sun, bright and energetic, and similar to a porthole – tying into our maritime heritage.” The circle element can be seen overlaid on the images on the homepage, where the chances are you won’t have noticed it. But it’s not part of the marque, and I doubt it’s ever going to become an indentifiable part of the brand.) Typographic logo is important, though. As I pointed out in the piece I wrote with my friends at Fabrik last summer the trend in the sector, not just in the UK but worldwide, is away from heraldry and symbols and towards much cleaner typographic treatments. In this respect, Solent’s approach is bang on trend.

So, from the point of view of brand strategy, the university and its agency, SMRS, have got it absolutely right (I’m going to exclude from this consideration ‘Ambitions you can believe in’ — a fatuous strapline that I suspect nobody will see as more than brand verbiage). Strategy is often considered to be something of a dark art but generally it is just a matter of recognising the obvious and having the courage to build one’s approach around it. Institutions often know what the obvious is (although it can be sometimes obscured by undergrowth) but their willingness to run with it is a very different matter. Full marks, therefore, to Solent for driving this through.

So far, so good. But now I come to the marque and... well, what can I say? It’s not really a marque at all — just three lines of caps set in Jeremy Tankard’s ‘Bliss’ type (which Solent have been using as a text font for the last few years). And after all those good decisions, this is a big disappointment. The result is weak, anonymous, undistinguished and eminently forgettable. The only good thing I can say about it is that they have hung on to the red which has been a recognisable feature of Solent’s communications for the last few years.

And two things are very wrong with it. The first is the use of capitals, which are everywhere on the way out. All caps settings increasingly feel like a relic of the past; it’s a pompous voice for an organisation to have. The most successful typographic university logos—Yale, for instance, or Imperial College, or the University of Southampton which we did at Precedent in 2006—have the name in upper and lower case (and today I’d even question UNIVERSITY OF in capitals in the Southampton logo). Maybe Oxford and Cambridge can get away with stentorian caps, given their 800 years of tradition, but it is far from ideal. (On the other hand Matthew Carter’s lovely upper and lower case namestyle for Yale gets it so totally right.) The second wrong thing is that rule between university and Southampton. It screams 1980s provincial printing. Its only mitigating quality is that it spares us the terrible prospect of all three lines being justified.

But what is most wrong with the new logo is what is not right with it, if that makes sense. When one designs a logo (and I realise to my dismay that I’m now approaching four decades of marque making) the first thing one does is to consider the letters which make up the name, and how they look in combination. In the name Solent there are three which have the potential to stand out: the initial S, the l (which in upper and lower case will rise asymmetrically above the others) and the final t. Of the three the S is the one with the most potential to add distinction. There are no possibilities for interesting combinations or connections but there is potential for a lovely alteration of verticals and curves: o and l, l and e, e and n, n and t. These are the kinds of typographic details that a designer should be looking for. And to create a striking, beautiful, memorable marque you need to draw, or at least adjust, all the letterforms to give the right balance to the whole. It’s the kind of crafting we did routinely in the 1980s, when there were skilled lettering artists to assist with this kind of work. But today it just doesn’t seem to happen any more. Indeed, it’s a miracle if the designer takes the trouble to adjust the spacing between letterforms, let alone the letterforms themselves.

It’s this lack of craft skills which is the most damning indictment of contemporary British branding (and it’s not as if there aren’t people who have these skills, just that they are so rarely involved in this kind of work). Shockingly, we really don’t seem to care about typography in branding. That’s like not caring about haute cuisine in a restaurant. The boorishness of ‘well, nobody will know it’s not Arial, anyway’ is no different to ‘well, nobody will know if we just whip it out of the freezer and bung it in the microwave’. (In 2006 I was invited to a Vice-Chancellor’s dinner at Middlesex University, where one of the most creative new British chefs was in charge of the kitchen. Everybody raved about the food, which was outstanding. Yet catering a dinner is far less important for a university than getting their logo right. But many universities’ ‘boil in the bag’ logos show that far less consideration is given to the latter.)

Look at the Yale logo. It’s only four letters, yet it is the wagyu beef or jamón ibérico of fine marquemaking. Everything about it—its visual weight, the character of the letterforms, their judicious spacing—is just right. It has presence. It has authority. It speaks of excellence, and dilligence, and tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge. All the things a great university should be seen to be about. Yet, for all its timelessness, it also looks stunning on an iPhone screen. It’s as simple as Zen and as resonant as great poetry. If you pay top dollar to an agency, this is what you should expect. Anything else is like being served sausages and mash at a three Michelin star eatery. Regrettably—following this metaphor—Solent have got themselves a home-cooked cauliflower cheese.