Fordham Rebrand 2025

The Context

When Fordham University launched a new brand identity developed by an external agency, University Marketing delivered system-wide guidelines for departments to implement. My role was to serve as the primary interpreter of those standards for the Career Center and put them into action across both our visual identity and brand voice, while maintaining full-scale operational output.

The Interpretation Challenge

Agency-created brand systems are designed for the institution as a whole. Applying them to a specific department with its own audience, operational cadence, and communication needs requires a layer of creative judgment that the guidelines themselves don’t provide. I was responsible for determining how the new visual standards should manifest across Career Center-specific materials, and where the department’s communication style needed to evolve alongside the visual refresh.

Brand Voice: The Young Millennial Manager

The visual rebrand was accompanied by a deliberate shift in the Career Center’s communication. I led the development of a new departmental voice I describe internally as the “young millennial manager” — professional and credible, but genuinely relatable to a student audience. The previous Student Affairs tone had a warmth that occasionally tipped into informality; the new Student Success positioning required us to command more respect while remaining accessible.

Building the Infrastructure

Rather than executing the rebrand in isolation, I built the internal systems to make the new standards sustainable across the team:

A Google Drive repository housing brand assets and reference materials
A Canva template library with pre-built layouts aligned to the new visual identity
A Canva brand kit encoding the updated color palette, typography, and logo standards
An instruction deck with practical tips for applying the guidelines across common use cases

This infrastructure shifted the rebrand into a sustainable operational standard — any team member producing materials could do so correctly without requiring individual guidance.

Scale & Execution

The update encompassed over 200 assets, executed concurrently with full departmental output during peak seasonal production. The sample assets below reflect the new visual and voice standards in practice across print, digital, and event materials.