edX Master Rebrand
edX is a global online learning platform that connects ambitious learners with programs and empowers them with job-relevant skills. While edX has been in operation since 2012, updated brand positioning and persona data provided a unique opportunity to redesign its legacy branding. Inspired by the rallying cry “fuel your ambition”, this project began as a brand awareness campaign challenge. We received full creative freedom to design outside the scope of the legacy edX branding. As we developed the campaign, we noticed stakeholders were excited to use this work in projects. This lead to senior leadership’s eventual request of an official rebrand in this campaign style. This also posed an important question: How might we elegantly bridge the legacy assets with the Fuel Your Ambition campaign in a way that referenced past work while still leaning into the vibrant new future?
The following sections detail how we transitioned this concept from a campaign toolkit to a brand book.
The “Fuel Your Ambition” campaign’s color palette differed from the legacy brand’s. The campaign colors balanced the serious tones of the fern, elm, and putty, with a punchy orange and pink. When placed into combinations, the creative could skew masculine, feminine, youthful, or mature. In contrast, edX’s legacy palette presented as electric, professional and masculine.
To bridge the gap between FYA and Legacy, we created rules for color, separating them into primaries and secondaries. This allowed us to maintain the familiarity of our legacy elm color while also introducing flairs (pink and orange) that add warmth and brightness.
Typography updates also played a role in conveying this new momentum while also paying homage to legacy styling. We took Inter, the legacy typeface, and used new font weights. These thicker weights revealed the roundness of the letterforms, creating a softer, approachable look to the typography. Being strategic in the letter casing and the text degree skew created more variety for designing promotional and brand awareness assets.
These color and typography rules allowed us to add nuance to the original campaign. They provided guidelines of when the brand should yell, when it should whisper, and what the quality of those sounds should feel like.
For photography, we returned to our brand positioning and unpacked the concept of ambition. The word holds a grinding, overworked sentiment. We wanted to move away from this to shift into a self-aware brand. People lead lives that are messy, bustling, and filled with more than professional development goals. Achievement can include spending more time with family, getting a new job to purchase a new house, or discovering a new passion. It was important in this post-Covid era, where online education is no longer novel, to differentiate ourselves by showcasing an awareness and an authentic support of these hopes and dreams beyond the digital classroom.
We also wanted to be mindful of emotion. Joy was such a defining factor in the original concept, but we found joyful photos assumed success. Since our learners’ professional goals aren’t on a linear path and our personas differ immensely, being mindful of the expressions we sourced in photography lead to authentic, intentional designs. Our exploration to the left conveys a spectrum of emotional experiences related to learner milestones.
From a stained coffee cup to a messy work desk, our lives are filled with small moments of time that helped to define who we are. We found that adding variety to our photography helped showcase an sincerity beyond a stylized portrait.
Maintaining legacy brand elements was crucial in bridging the gaps between the old and the new. For the mnemonic devices, we kept the 12 degree skew and parallelogram. We also pulled from Concept 2’s silhouetted text treatment to create typographic patterns at a 12 degree skew. This served as an original texture for marketing and web collateral.
Promotional campaign assets were designed to hone in on conversion and revenue metrics by leaning into templitized layouts and prioritizing copy, which annouce discounts and offers.
Brand awareness campaign assets were designed to express the brand’s breadth, communicating its identity through bespoke elements and heavy stylization.
Our design solutions showcase how we used our guidelines to create unique marking collateral, maintaining the foundational rules while also allowing space for creative freedom and flexibility.
