in thursday nights star was a preview of the new visual identity for sheffield university which has now gone live at

http://www.shef.ac.uk/

with what departments look like at

http://www.shef.ac.uk/marcoms/

what does everybody think of it?

dave

I think it looks quite smart, although, is it just me, but does it look nearly the same as it did before? They've kept the blue and white colour scheme almost identical, that's for sure.

I like the new photographs on the home page, and it's nice to see an acknowledgment of the place having university status for 100 years.

I REALLY hope they didn't pay anyone to design it! The image bar on the main page is AWFULL!!! The departmental pages are marginally better but could so with some tidying up!

I think awful is a little strong. It's simple, neat, and functional. Not a patch on the house style of the Sheffield Forum website though, naturally... ;)

I'd get rid of the pictures of the students, it looks a bit twee.

The new health building on the Hallam university site looks good, another plus for our students.

A good thing about the re-vamp is the fact that they've finally updated the English Language and Linguistics page. All the stuff on there used to be terribly out-dated, aesthetically speaking as well as information-wise.

Its crap and unrealistic - it should have at least one shot of some poor sap with a kebab smeared over their face being sick against the wall outside the leadmill - and perhaps some naked people smoking drugs. This, I feel would give the university a more real and therefore dynamic appeal and would indicate why people go to university in the first place.

University is so much more than just work!

its not only the website that has changed but the actual logo, does that arise any comments?

dave

I'm at the uni and while I don't find the logo itself offensive, in fact I think it's quite nice, I resent the fact that thousands of pounds have been spent on it.
Half the facilites at this uni are rubbish, the library is crap, there aren't enough computing facilites and some of the courses are so disorganised, I believe there are far better things to spend the money on!

Originally posted by evildrneil
I REALLY hope they didn't pay anyone to design it! The image bar on the main page is AWFULL!!! The departmental pages are marginally better but could so with some tidying up!

The company in charge of the re design is non other than Sheffield's own Designers Republic!

Fot those that don't know DR they are quite a big company that are more famous for designing Pop culture, from record artists such as Supergrass to video games like Wipeout.

They designed the whole identity for Warp Records originally from Sheff.

So it's fair to say they'll be getting paid something.:wink:

I was expecting something a bit more cutting edge, looks like they hav'nt really thought about it.

Perhaps they should stick to what they do best!

OK - rather than just awfull some immediate comments:

The people in the pictures were obviously chosen just to show ethnic inclusivity - and then repeated just in case we disn't beat you around the head with our PC-ness the first time.

There is no attempt to blend the images in any way - they are utterly disjointed.

The main bar is of pretty subdued colours and then is interupted with a block of red (no sorry make that RED!!!) which has the visual impact and grace of a carcrash on the M1

The logo sits in a block of white on top of the main image bar - there seems to be no attempt to integrate into the page as a whole.

Move to another page and the menus are disjointed and scattered randomly across the screen.

The whole thing smacks of being slapped together in a rush with no real attempt at design, let alone HCI. to be honest I think they would have been better getting one or more of the universities HCI and design courses to work on it - at least then you would get something of a students view of the place...

That red block is the real problem - it grabs your eye and pulls you to the centre, almost making you forget the site you're viewing.

The use of blue / white works really well, but that graphic strip just squats there like turd on a lace doily.

Joe

DIABOLICAL!!!! Its flat, dull and boring to look at. Does nothing to inspire at all, the the student pictures are totally awful.....I would have at least NOT repeated the images TWICE on the same page. And yes the horrible red block in the middle is a real turn-off. On top of that it took 45 seconds to load the home page are they running this site from an old 386 PC with 2 MB of RAM?

Come on Sheffield Uni this web site looks like a reject project from a web design student....its very dated looking and has none of the visual excellance of SHeffield hallams site which is far more functional and attractive to look at.

And look at the Sheffield University Union site
http://www.shef.ac.uk/union/
far far better

I would be very interested to see the consultation that led to such a drastic change of their corporate identity. As a business consultant, when clients ask about changing their logo / branding I always try to 'unpick' why they actually want to. Whether they've become bored with their brand (this happens frequently believe it or not), whether their customers have become bored with the brand or whether they're just changing it for the sake of it.

I wouldn't be surprised if this example of corporate-wide rebranding was costing something to the tune of £5m. If their reasons for changing it cannot be cemented with evidence then it seems like a colossal waste of funds.

Can't believe it was Designers Republic who did it?! I love their work, but I guess they'll have had some pretty hard guide lines to follow.

The article in the Star last week referred to the new identity as a "laughable logo." I quite agree - it's an embarrassment and I'm ashamed to have to use it myself. Many of the staff here at the uni are appalled at the new logo, partly because the shield design has barely changed from the original and partly because they can't even get the grammar right (very oddly placed capital letters and full stops). As far as I know they employed a huge team of people (or company as people are saying above) to redesign it and it cost millions. They seem to have got their spending priorities wrong once again.

Originally posted by chri5
Can't believe it was Designers Republic who did it?! I love their work, but I guess they'll have had some pretty hard guide lines to follow.

Yes, but that's what a Design House are meant to do.

If they felt they couldn't deliver they shouldn't have taken the brief - but having said that I'd say it's much less a poke at them and much more a poke at the people in the University who approved the finished work.

Joe

Its rubbish - the old one wasnt exactly cutting edge design, but the layout was a damn sight (site? :P) better than this! :rant:

Is it a joke? :loopy:

Unfortunately, it's not a joke. The University have their spending priorities completely wrong. A completely outdated main library that is inaccessible to disabled students and rundown student accommodation and this is all they can think to spend their money on? An institution that produces academics and yet is run by those without a braincell!

I hate it.

I'm lost, confused and eww! The red is horrible, and it totally grabs your concentration... even when concentrating on looking for a specific link, I can't help being drawn to the red block. There's far too much white space, and the home page is hardly 'welcoming'!

Does anyone else think this image is a bit of a joke:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/03/02/52/MarComs_homeimg.jpg

This is from the homepage of the department resposible for graphic design!

Aside from the image being very unoriginal, the perspective of the text is all wrong, and the signs that have been 'added' to the original pic look completely wrong.

Now I'm no graphic designer, but I wouldn't let this pic out into the world if I'd done it.

looks 10 years out of date. Couldn't they find more than 3 students to put on main page. Looks sloppy.

I must say I wasn't terribly impressed, perhaps because I belong to the pedantic category who object to the capital letter in Of and the full stop at the end. I also agree that the website redesign is also pretty dismal, and that block of red is very distracting. And yes, that sign is as dismal a piece of Photoshopping as I've seen for a while - even I could do better than that.

I can't really believe that most of it is the work of the Designer's Republic though... if they'd made the University site look like an Autechre album there'd have been some point employing them. And it would have been better too... actually there's a thought... come on you graphic designery types, there's a challenge... show us what the University site would have looked like if the Designer's Republic had done it in their usual style!

This would have been an extremely challenging job for any creative agency to take on. Generally the rebranding of an established historical brand initially incites negative responses.
In taking a look at the end result, we also have to remember that whoever was hired to carry out this 'brand makeover' was one of many parties involved in the project. Believe it or not, the creatives don't get the final say. :|
Imagine for a minute the whole (painstaking, to be sure) process that went into this. What were the initial concepts like? What changed when the senior committee of the University sat down together to provide their feedback... each person wants to make the most of their opportunity to have some impact on the final income. The public is left mystified at the final result - what did they pour all their money into that for? In the end the design you see is what was approved by the client.
Without knowing the original goals of the effort it is hard to judge whether or not it was successful.
It's also important to take a look at the genre, if you will - what's going on visually with other universities?
Oxford (http://www.ox.ac.uk/)
Cambridge (http://www.cam.ac.uk/)
Princeton (http://www.princeton.edu/)
Harvard (http://www.harvard.edu/)

I would say all of them look better than Sheffield, and none of them have a capital o in of (unless you count Cambridge where everything is in capitals) and absolutely none of them have a full stop at the end. Actually I'd say Princeton was the least impressive of them, but maybe that's also because it looked the most modern and I think they might have gone for something with a bit more gravitas (in fact it looks a bit like the design for our own beloved Sheffield Forum logo!). Having said that, I'm not entirely sure you're comparing like with like... even the most ardent Sheffield supporter would be hard pushed to claim that it was in the same league as those four august institutions!

As for this just being a reaction to something new, you may be right. But this is hardly the rebranding of an old-established historical brand: the University has only had that overall design on its site for two or three years, and I was more impressed with that scheme when it first appeared than I am with its replacement.

Originally posted by metalman
I must say I wasn't terribly impressed, perhaps because I belong to the pedantic category who object to the capital letter in Of and the full stop at the end.

The final full point and the initial upper case letter on each line imply emphasis and confidence, according to the marketing department (http://www.shef.ac.uk/marcoms/visualid/elements/logo/lettering.html)...

No, it doesn't convince me either.

IanR

I have to agree that a rebranding of something like a university is a major undertaking, however I find both the concept and execution. You can see how the management lot were thinking in some cases - e.g. in the main page image bar it's obvious that they are trying to get across the idea of ethnic inclusivity which is all very well and laudable. However rather than trying something subtle and realistic like a shot of the concourse which is pretty much always filled with a goodly mix of students from all over the world instead they take three very plastic posed pictures of token black, white and asian students (who incidently look stiff and not at all enjoying the process) and use them to beat you around the head with their inclusivity. As well as the execution of the concept fairly simple web design basics like an overall look and feel, coherent menus and good use of screen real estate have all been pretty much ignored.

Use of a simple piece of existing portal software (e.g. phpNuke) to handle the functionality plus a bit of thought on the creative side could have turned out something MUCH better in much less time and for a fraction of the cost...

Looking
At
It
Again.

... the other thing that doesn't really work for me is the way that the two short words and two long words are left justified so that your eye is jagging about from one line to the next. If you look at Cambridge's logo it looks a much more compact arrangement (perhaps because they've left out the The).

And on the website, the other distracting thing I've noticed is the way the blue rectangle at the top left seems to bleed into the photograph next to it because of the funny blueish colour of the shiny floor the guy is standing on. This would be so easy to correct by moving the order of the pictures.

If you look at the actual code for the homepage you will see how basic and dated it is.......is someone telling me this took more than 10 minutes wo knock together because I dont believe it. Is someone telling me this cost £5 million K to produce because I dont believe that either.

And the actual logo graphic design itself, which is maybe the main part of the price they paid, is a joke. Whoever decided to use this is either blind, stupid or dead!

If I was a potential student I would be so put of by this horrible front page I would move on to another University site very quickly. Its the front page to one of the best universities in the UK and they employ this amateurish doodle? A year ago this site was far better,not fantastic but at leats it looked professional. This is BAD design by someone who is not only totally colourblind, but who has as much sense of composition and symmetrical design as a water vole.

i don't think the design is that far from what it was before, i don't mind it, it could be better, but it's job is to be informative not funky/visually innovative.
However, the webmail link instead of letting you log in now gives you info on what webmail is which is not useful at all, and it took me ages to find the Log Into Muse link.

Originally posted by IanR
The final full point and the initial upper case letter on each line imply emphasis and confidence, according to the marketing department (http://www.shef.ac.uk/marcoms/visualid/elements/logo/lettering.html)...

No, it doesn't convince me either.

IanR

To me it implies ignorance.

Originally posted by goldenfleece
This is BAD design by someone who is not only totally colourblind, but who has as much sense of composition and symmetrical design as a water vole.

I'm with Tufte & Tischold on symmetrical designs though - they suck, for the most part, when trying to produce a readable page.

Like blocks of centred text. We read from left to right, not from the centre outwards.

That said, the site is pretty bad. All table layout, no visited link colouring (where have I been on this site?) and that banner graphic on the front page is overlarge, distracting and repeats itself as the background to the table cell as well as being placed in it.

Get rid of the banner and it starts to look a bit better, at least more like the other pages within.

But the lack of a defined vlink attribute in the CSS is a really really elementary ommission.

It wasn't done by DR was it? The page itself says these people were responsible - "polopoly.com"

The polopoly.com website confirms this - its all in the source on the homepage.

polopoly is the producer of the content management system the university uses

dave

***************************88

[QUOTE]Originally posted by CJB444
[B]I don't know what they were thinking. Design at a consultation in December an all there disliked the unnecessary rebranding,

Sorry! My keyboard seems to be substituting words!...I meant..... that I attended a consultation in December and all who attended expressed a dislike of the unneccessary rebranding.

To add insult to injury, I have uncovered that students at the University are no longer to be issued with paper copies of lecture slides at the lecture itself. They must now print them themselves (at their own expense) after the lecture from the University's e-learning software WebCT. This policy is inline with the University's new "efficiency drive".

What are the University of Sheffield thinking? Their spending priorities are entirely wrong- cutting accessibility to lecture notes citing "efficiency" when, all the time, they are pursuing an unnecessary and costly programme of corporate rebranding.

I have to say I'm not keen. It may grow on me (and it has done a bit since I first saw it). It looks a bit better on printed materials I have seen than on the web, which I think doesn't reflect well on the whole new identity at all.

The trouble with using non-standard typography is that it dates quickly, once the novelty has worn off. Will it be referred to as The University Of Sheffield. in copy, as well as the logo? It reminds me of the slew of businesses that sprung up about 5 years ago with @ signs in their name. And doesn't that look dated now?

The stuff about 'what things represent' is waffle, and is nearly always written AFTER a design has been agreed, to justify it. Remember most designers are usually very cynical about these things!

To me, it smacks of a 'design by committee' solution - I'd imagine DR came up with a much more far-our design which has been diluted by various other people and stages of the process.

It begs the question is DR the right agency to do this sort of work - they are good at what they do, but I wouldn't have thought of them for this kind of corporate work (maybe its my misconception of them) - rather than their usual funkier trendier client.

It says it has been comprehensively market tested - and when you consider their main market (yes, it is a business now, not an academic institution) is 18-21 year olds, it probably goes down quite well with them. Unfortunately, they probably haven't considered too much that the identity must be open to those who AREN'T their paying customers. For example university staff, researchers from UK and overseas, the Sheffield residents who see university buildings and signage on a daily basis and live near students etc - is this identity going to be inclusive and bring the whole community closer, or make non-students feel more isolated from the university's 'trendy' image, that they don't like or can't relate to?

The test of an identity is its longevity - and I think with its typographic novelty, this logo may be too trendy to be timeless.

Originally posted by JonJParr
To add insult to injury, I have uncovered that students at the University are no longer to be issued with paper copies of lecture slides at the lecture itself. They must now print them themselves (at their own expense) after the lecture from the University's e-learning software WebCT. This policy is inline with the University's new "efficiency drive".

What are the University of Sheffield thinking? Their spending priorities are entirely wrong- cutting accessibility to lecture notes citing "efficiency" when, all the time, they are pursuing an unnecessary and costly programme of corporate rebranding.

I get my lecture notes both on paper in lectures, and also available on WebCT incase we miss lectures.

Well, here's the Universitys explianation:

"The ligature that unites the curve of the second "f" of Sheffield with the dot of the following "i" is an example of expert typographical practice, which is rarely consciously noted by readers but which subtly implies quality. The final full point and the initial upper case letter on each line imply emphasis and confidence.

The layout of the University's name within the logo is echoed in the four-line statements of University core values which also form part of the visual identity in publications and on the website."

Which indicates that they know its wrong.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/marcoms/visualid/elements/logo/lettering.html

If you go to the shef uni homepage shef.ac.uk,

at the bottom right hand corner you will notice that the link to the privacy policy page is half hidden under the blue navigation bar :hihi: :hihi: :loopy:

Talk about private.

Note: I use firefox

To me it implies ignorance.

Can't agree more Longshanks. I work at the Uni and have yet to find anyone there who likes the "The University Of Sheffield." logo. What's more there has been a stream of various edicts from on high forcing us to comply with this rebranding process.

As for the logo - just how this is supposed to imply academic excellence when it doesn't adhere to basic rules of English frankly beggars belief in my opinion.

To add insult to injury, I have uncovered that students at the University are no longer to be issued with paper copies of lecture slides at the lecture itself. They must now print them themselves (at their own expense) after the lecture from the University's e-learning software WebCT. This policy is inline with the University's new "efficiency drive".


Not sure what your source is Jon but it is very badly mis-informed. I work in a department where ALL the undergraduates get paper copies of lecture notes, tutorial questions, past papers, etc. etc.

Not sure what your source is Jon but it is very badly mis-informed. I work in a department where ALL the undergraduates get paper copies of lecture notes, tutorial questions, past papers, etc. etc.

Free?

To agree with posters above, the 'The University Of Sheffield.' rebranding is an absolute joke.

In 4 years at the University i NEVER got paper handouts of the slides etc, they very rarely even got put online for us to download..

we had to take notes :o :o :o

Free?

To agree with posters above, the 'The University Of Sheffield.' rebranding is an absolute joke.

Copies of all lecture notes and tutorial questions and answers are handed out free of charge. I personally spend several hours at the start of each semester photocopying notes for my students.

I can't speak for other departments but this is certainly the norm. in mine.

Free?

To agree with posters above, the 'The University Of Sheffield.' rebranding is an absolute joke.

-----

Just imagine that the Department of English Literature are now being forced to make a basic grammatical error by using a capital 'O' for 'Of' in mid sentence for the name of their institution. Everybody must be laughing at the irony. The charter and statutes clearly state the word 'of' - lower case. Every day we witness instances of our language being decimated, but for a University to do that in it's own title? That one takes the biscuit in my book.

-----

Just imagine that the Department of English Literature are now being forced to make a basic grammatical error by using a capital 'O' for 'Of' in mid sentence for the name of their institution. Everybody must be laughing at the irony. The charter and statutes clearly state the word 'of' - lower case. Every day we witness instances of our language being decimated, but for a University to do that in it's own title? That one takes the biscuit in my book.

I couldn't agree more. This is embarrassing for Sheffield, and comes across as profoundly ignorant. I consider myself lucky that I got my degree certificate before it happened, otherwise I would have had to tippex it out and correct it with a lower-case 'o' using Letraset! Apparently, it's supposed to make you think, but think what exactly? How stupid I presume!

Makes you think all right, think what the hell were they on when they thought of it

In some respects the full stop is even worse. Every single sign, document, thesis (ggggggrrrrrr!) has the full stop and looks ridiculous.

Can't agree more Longshanks. I work at the Uni and have yet to find anyone there who likes the "The University Of Sheffield." logo. What's more there has been a stream of various edicts from on high forcing us to comply with this rebranding process.



Just ignore it. I have never once used the official power point slides in a presentation and unless the uni employs spies at conferences how on earth can they check this? Ignoring might not work for things closer to home perhaps though.

I've got a big pile of old-style headed notepaper somewhere.. might be worth a fortune now!