Context
St. Andrews is often known as the bubble; a self-contained town centred around its vibrant student community. Student elections are a very visible and engaging part of the academic year.
The Covid era prompted a shift to online voting for student elections, presenting challenges in disseminating election information. As part of creating their digital elections awareness campaign I was asked to design their new identity.
Exploration
Exploration began from the binary choice— “yes” or “no,” represented by a tick or cross. While the previous logo used an organic cross to represent writing on a paper ballot, we wanted to take a more angular approach to reflect to digital-only campaign.
Originally I didn’t want to use just an X as it didn’t represent the physical act of voting that the previous logo did, but then I was shown the online voting system. You selected a candidate by clicking a box next to their name, and once selected, it would be filled with an X.
Refinement
I dropped the tick element of the design, using just the X; thus keeping some through line from the previous logo and instead incorporated speech bubbles to symbolize voicing your opinion.
Brand Colours & Typography
The Students’ Association has a 3-colour system. Blue for events, Yellow for Representation, and Red for Societies.
While elections are both an event and most definitely about representation, I opted for blue as the primary colour. We were trying to get students to feel the buzz of elections and how they could be involved, a ‘happening’ of sorts. Yellow would be a secondary colour, to splash where appropriate. Finally I used a dark green as a more harmonious alternative to true black.
Regarding the typeface, Gotham was already part of the Student’s Associations branding – a sufficiently chunky choice to pair with the heavyset logomark.
Logo Lockup
The Logomark had to work alongside the exact, and lengthy title required by the Students’ Associations constitution; Student’s Association Elections. With this in mind I made both portrait and landscape lockups that used – Gotham – a suitably chunky typeface used by the Student’s Association as part of their wider branding.
Applying the Brand
We had to meet students where they were – largely online – meaning more competition for attention than out of home advertising. So we had to adapt our approach to balance brand consistency with eye-catching designs.
To maintain brand consistency, a variety of layouts were employed, accompanied by the use of duotone imagery in brand colours, ensuring visual coherence without overly limiting the final compositions.
