Candler School of Theology is a pillar of Emory University, and is renowned for the quality of theological education they provide. They partnered with us to take that level of renown, and clarify it into a distinctive brand and enhanced web experience that would position Candler to connect with the brightest minds in their field.
What makes Candler special? It’s a meaningful place to those who know it well, but even they struggled to explain its essence. We had to find the difference and put it into words.
The visual brand needed to jump of the page, while still honoring core components of the Emory University brand. In a space where many competitors play it safe visually, we were looking for a way to shine.
For the Candler team, a well documented brand was as important as a strong one. On the website, we had to both organize the front end navigation to make it easier for users, and implement new systems on the back end that would save the marketing team headaches.
The end goal here was to identify what made Candler stand out to students — we figured the best way to figure out why a student would choose Candler was to talk to students who had chosen Candler. Here’s what we heard.
We heard repeatedly that one of Candler’s great strengths was the diversity of its community; a diversity that the institution has intentionally built. Audiences with very different backgrounds can be a messaging pain point – we determined it was best embraced as a core messaging pillar.
The other thing we found that made Candler feel so unique was the way it sent students into the world. Students are asked to bring their own experiences into the classroom, as valuable context for their academic studies — then, they’re asked to take those big ideas they study in the classroom into context in the real world, and apply them to multitudes of service.
We wanted to position the new brand around those key elements of Candler that excited students, faculty and staff the most. In the end, it all boiled down to two things: the optimism of the community that each individual could make their own impact, and the fact that a Candler education actually enabled that type of unique impact. With our new rallying cry of “Go, Make Your Change,” we refined the brand platform and set the foundation for an exciting new visual identity.
We had a strong new central message that was authentic to Candler and their audiences. But with so many audiences, and so many touchpoints for them, we had to ensure that the messaging translated.
We had learned a lot about Candler through research and strategy, but to land on an impactful visual concept we boiled it all down to three core truths.
The resulting visual concept centered on the people who make up the Candler community, and the positive change that they create around them. We wanted to take the idea of the ripple, which could have felt cliche, and give it enough of a modern spin that it felt like a true expression of the Candler brand.
When we visited campus, there were certain architectural details we felt particularly inspired by. We knew we wanted to represent the intangible feeling of being at Candler in our visual identity. Cannon Chapel serves as a central meeting place for every student at Candler. We reimagined familiar elements of the chapel itself as accent pieces for the new brand. We pick that up as a accent to add texture to specific layouts, and as a nod to those who know and love Candler.
In order to stay connected to Emory University’s brand, the primary color palette was kept intact – instead of a drastic overhaul, we bolstered the palette with several warm accent colors that gave the system more flexibility, warmth and and a modern feel. We focused on identifying type styles that would feel academic without feeling stuffy — finding that balance led us toward styles that are favored by book publishers, but that still had the flexibility to make an impact on web applications.
With all this brand work in place, we turned to creating a comprehensive style guide that would feel useful for the whole Candler team. We didn’t want it to collect dust — so we worked with them to outline exactly which guidelines would be most useful, where there team would benefit from the most instruction, and even the right language to use in that instruction.
The Candler experience is so rich, we knew that words alone wouldn’t do it justice. When we outlined the page titled The Candler Experience, a key landing page in the Admissions section of the site, we planned for an immersive visual moment that would play perfectly alongside the strong messaging we’d developed.
Our findings during strategy showed the vibrancy of the people that make up the Candler community. We wanted their voices to be featured all over the website, sharing their unique experiences in their own words.
We also found that prospective students (and potential faculty members) found a lot of value in the Candler faculty. These are some of the best theological scholars in the country — we wanted to create a highly functional directory that felt like more than a list of contact info.
Candler prides itself on leaving room for its students to forge unique paths for themselves. We found in our research that no matter how unique their path to impact, each Candler student’s goal ultimately was to make an impact. While that became the core of our messaging, we created content on the website that showed just how flexible a Candler education could be. Ultimately, we made it easy for students to envision both the tangible and intangible experience of being at Candler, while making the site easy to navigate.
