Branding a Students' Union

Put your flat white down, pause Angry Birds and disappoint your twitter followers for a few minutes; the hottest new brand has just arrived:

Sidney Sussex Students' Union.

We may not have the pervasion of Innocent or Apple just yet, but we are well on our way with our new communications.


Having decided that our college students' union was misunderstood in a tragically teenage way by both the students and the fellows of college, members of the committee set to do something about it. After a 3 hour creative session with the president and vice president, I was able to get a sense of where the union was at currently and where we wanted it to be. In a workshop with the rest of the committee, I asked difficult, probing and downright annoying questions to garner a sense of our shared values and perceptions of the union from those who work to build and maintain it. Through questions like, "What does SSCSU do best?"to "What would SSCSU be if it were a building?", I collected a range of illuminating responses.

With a handful of useful post-its, on which the committee had contributed their thoughts, like speculations that SSCSU would be a converse if it were a shoe and a family home if it were a building, we came up with some conclusions. Our personality, we decided, is open, inclusive, transparent and thoughtful, amongst other things. Our beliefs include such credos as the statement that every student has a voice and that change is achievable through democratic efforts.

After collecting such great input from the committee, we opened up the questions to the rest of college to broaden our understanding of our role within the community. Combined with the concrete messages of what we believe in and what we aim to achieve, we began to develop a general picture that we were perceived as doing valuable work, but not everyone knew exactly what this hard work entailed...

So with the help of two designers, Georgia and Dave, we created an image to help portray best our brand and explain exactly what it is that we are here for. The output of all this work is an evocative, vibrant and eye-catching graphic that, along with our stated values and personality, helps to define and ground the important work that we do for the students' union. Check out the following and watch this space, because SSCSU's brand has arrived.