Cabrillo College came to us with a desire for us to create companion branding and messaging for their Career Technical Education (CTE) courses and programs. The brand needed to work with the overall Cabrillo College brand, yet be distinctive enough to stand alone.
We started by establishing the name, Cabrillo Works, for the CTE program. Using the name of the school and the practical, job and career focused aspect of the program, made for a combination that gets the core messaging across.
The primary logo pulls from the college's current brand colors and adds the element of water, drawn from the nearby Monterey Bay. The double inverted triangle gives different departments a unique palette and image in a container that has plenty of real estate. Lastly, the triangles infer the 'W' in Works.
We grouped the sub-brands together using colors. Hence all of the medical sub-brands have a purple aspect to them, the computer and digital arts sub-brands are in the orange/yellow spectrum, etc.
The photos are also specifically chosen for the program. We worked with a small team at Cabrillo who provided us with established colors and gave us direction on image types the program directors felt represented their programs.
We honored the colors used in the Cabrillo College overall brand, yet took it in a more friendly direction. We chose black and white photography to prevent color competition between the images and the sub-brand colors.
We chose the sans-serif font Trade Gothic LT because it has a great combination of characteristics: both a condensed and regular style, a modern feel that felt welcoming and strong without taking away from the imagery in the primary logo and sub-brands. The condensed version was particularly important because some of the programs have long names.
The logos were designed to be interconnected. The brand extension pattern shows how all of them can play well together and can be used to include several programs in a single piece of collateral.
With all brands, it's important to see it 'in the wild'. We like to show how the brand extends across different types of collateral, advertising, and marketing swag.
