brief
craft a hyper-relevant brand identity for an academic application consultancy from the ground up.
strategy
there are more than 17 million students in europe whose stories and achievements grant them the prize of college admission. we figured that they are a lot like intellectual athletes, competing for spots. that is why we positioned an application consultancy as the representation of these athletes, the agents that help them perform by distilling their stories into the medium of a college application.
name & logo
we called them best.u.
story-distillation is in the heart of the brand. the application consultants trim the whole story of you down to a simple, crisp and readable u. the “best” in front is there to sum up “simple, crisp and readable” into one word, describing what’s left on the page after their process.
u became a foundational element of the brand.
dynamic brand identity
best.u presented its words with a slanted font symbolizing the dynamic essense of the application process.
applicant stories come in all shapes and sizes. adapting to their specifics in each application is essential to best.u. that is why we gave their U enough looks to make sure it can fit with anyone.
tagline
best.u
we put the u in uni
yes, we gave best.u some sass. after all, their target is the bastion of sass in modern pop-culture.
communicating the medium
you bring the story and best.u adapts it to the format that they are experts in — college applications. to show the result of best.u’s process of adapting you to a u, we studied the backstories of characters that everyone knows and created a series of posts showing what their college essays would sound like if they applied through best.u.
Here’s Frank Abegnale from Catch Me If You Can:
“I know that your program is selective and I hope that my having gone only up to 10th grade highschool does not fail me due to a prerequisite. But you should know that by the time I was 16 and in 10th grade, my parents had planned on getting a diveorce after 22 years of marriage. Unlike some families where the children are told early on, my parents failed to mention their plans until I was excused from class one day to be brought to the steps of a family court where I had to choose between custodies. In a 10 minute recess of that process I ran away, something very common for a kid to do back then. It was 7 years before I saw my mother again. It was some time where I had to survive with being a 16 year old that had only gotten up to 10th grade of high school. I quickly realized that as long as anyone believed that, I would not be able to sustain myself, so with the little gray hair that I always had on my head I stumbled my way onto a law degree, a pilot’s license, a doctor’s office and a bunch of counterfeit checks. You could say I cheated, and I would agree, but I would add that it took a bit more than malice to pull all of that off.”
client side: Katrin Malcheva & Ioana Alexandra Benea
creative director: angel iskrev
copywriter: Boyan Zlatarski
junior copywriter: Rosen Tzakovski
head of art: Emanuela Belovarski
junior graphic designer: Andriana Petkova
junior graphic designer: Bozhidar Ivanov
motion graphics: vess blackstone
strategist: Ekaterina Mutafchieva & Mira Panova
client operations director: Sanya Stefanova
account executive: Ivana Valcheva
