Executive School For Creatives, Future London Academy educate the creative industry with offline and online courses in leadership, branding and many more topics. Priding itself on ‘never stop learning’ and adapting, its design team has redesigned the visual identity for its Executive Programme for Design Leaders – an MBA-style programme for creatives and designers with 15+ years of experience. Taught in-person by industry leaders like James Hilton, Co-founder of AKQA, Bidisha Sinha, Associate Director of Zaha Hadid Architects and many others.

With digital and human transformation driving the identity’s design, Future London Academy opted for a waveform as the lead graphic across the new design system. Signifying how the programme helps creative directors and business owners transform their leadership styles. Furthermore, conveying how the learning experience is curated to adapt to innovations in business and technology. The waveform was then developed as 3D rendered manipulations to react with programme imagery. Expressing how the programme can change leaders’ mindsets and show them different perspectives from the creative industry.

The design team worked alongside Svyat Vishnyakov, Co-founder of Electric Red Studio, who consulted on the rebrand. Svyat designed the original identity for Design Leaders, inspired by design principles championed by the Bauhaus – using a modular grid with simple geometric forms. Steering away from the Bauhaus, the waveform reacts with the existing modular grid. Building on this, the lead graphic interacts with a new typeface pairing – the original custom typeface, Ony Future. Its geometric glyphs strongly contrast Noe, a modern serif with audacious strokes, together forming a powerful typographic pairing.

Bringing all the graphic elements together is Future London Academy’s warm and energetic colour yellow. “The challenge was to create a new, future-facing identity by bringing in new elements, but still making it recognisable as a Future London Academy programme,” Designer Polina Kirei tells us, “the transformative nature of the waveform.” she adds “allowed us to create a range of elegant but structured layouts whilst maintaining total brand consistency.”