edX brand.
edX is an online learning platform that delivers education in support of individual career investments and prioritizes job-relevant skills. Following the in-house and in-market success of the Fuel Your Ambition campaign, the vibrant, joyful look and feel was adopted as a full-scale refresh of the consumer-facing brand.
dna
Our brand positioning and DNA helps us reconcile the internal values that define our brand with the external market forces that determine our learners’ needs. When we understand how those worlds come together, we can identify what differentiates us from competitors and encapsulate our value to learners. Our DNA articulates the traits and attributes that inform our behavior and authentically express our brand values.
edX began as an experiment, which means resourcefulness, problem-solving, and foresight are hardcoded into our origin story and our ethos. We approach our goals with intention and exude quiet confidence. We take seriously the sacrifices our learners make in pursuit of their education.
identity
We focus on people before products. When we understand learners’ wants, needs, fears, and challenges, we can offer them solutions that meet their needs and that make them feel seen, secure, and excited.
To enhance the brand’s approachability, I introduced the heaviest font weight of our legacy brand, used in all lower case, allowing the round letterforms and humanist elements to take the forefront. Subheads are set in the same font, at a lighter weight with wide spacing, in all caps, giving an air of authority to otherwise disarming compositions.
Because our logo remained in tact through this identity refresh, I added a fern green and a putty off-white to complement the dark Elm logo color. To expand the color bar and bring emotion, I added friendly tones like a rose quartz pink and vibrant tangerine orange.
photography
What does ambition look like? If we answered that question based on what we see in the media, we might imagine the extremes: the sleep-deprived professional, the 25/8 entrepreneur, the tireless athlete. In reality, ambition has many faces.
We believe that the path to transformation is personal, mutable, and rarely linear, and that the learners who travel it always carry their “why” with them. That means that our definition of ambition runs counter to always-on, never-stop hustle culture narratives. We express ambition in ways that may not be obvious to outside observers, but that capture the diverse and nuanced ways our learners experience it.
Curated photography sets the visual tone and is pivotal in the delivery of the all-at-once approachable and aspirational positioning. These images are crisp, saturated, and well-lit. A combination of bright, stylized portraiture, focused crops, and detailed textures work together to tell a cohesive story and represent the brand’s core DNA.
guidelines
We created a resource that was designed to help creatives, marketers, and other stakeholders produce assets that are compelling to our learners and consistent with our brand. We included foundational information about our brand relationships, target audiences, value propositions, and voice and tone in addition to specific directions about how to apply our visual identity and messaging principles to a wide range of assets.
awareness
Campaigns that prioritize brand awareness use bespoke elements targeted at top of funnel demographics — those that don’t know what edX is or even that continuing education is the solution they are after.
promotion
Campaigns that prioritize conversion and revenue metrics should drive enrollments, registrations, and other revenue-generating actions. These assets are often templatized and created in quick succession, when deadlines are tight and collaboration time is limited.
legacy
