Education Branding Is a Translation Problem. Most Agencies Treat It Like a Design Problem.
The briefs we receive from educational institutions and research organizations share a common frustration: they’ve worked with agencies before, received things that looked polished, and still felt like something essential was missing. The work was competent. It just didn’t feel true.
We’ve come to think this happens because most agencies approach education branding as a design problem. The institution has a thing to communicate; the agency makes it look good. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. The harder and more important work is translation—taking something complex, internally understood, and deeply felt within an institution and finding the visual and verbal language that carries it accurately to the outside world.
Design without translation produces work that’s visually coherent but institutionally hollow. Translation without design produces work that’s earnest but ineffective. The combination—which is what a genuinely good education branding company offers—is rarer than it should be.
Why Educational Institutions Are a Distinct Creative Challenge
Most branding principles apply everywhere. But we’ve found—across years of work with universities, research centers, and healthcare institutions in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—that education clients face a version of the same problem: the audiences they need to reach don’t agree on what the institution is.
A university campaign has to land simultaneously with prospective students, major donors, faculty, legislators, and community members—each arriving with different assumptions, loyalties, and levels of familiarity. The temptation is to resolve that tension by making the work broad enough to offend nobody. What actually works is harder: finding the true thing the institution needs to say and trusting that it will land differently for different audiences without losing its core.
Then there’s institutional history. Universities and research centers carry decades of brand equity embedded in their names, visual traditions, and cultural associations. The goal is almost always evolution, not replacement—stretching existing identity carefully rather than erasing it. Agencies that default to a clean-slate approach tend to produce work the institution’s longtime stakeholders don’t recognize as their own.
And education branding almost always ends up in physical space: wayfinding, building lobbies, donor environments, digital signage that people walk past every day. We’ve learned this isn’t incidental to the work—it’s central to it. A creative partner who thinks only in pixels or social formats is solving a partial problem.
Three Translation Problems We’ve Worked Through
The projects that have shaped our thinking most are the ones where the translation problem was genuinely hard—where the institution had something real to say and the creative challenge was finding the form that could hold it.
OHSU — Making Research Identity Visible in Space
Our work with Oregon Health & Science University has spanned a strategic plan video, the launch campaign for the OHSU Now app, and the digital experience at the Knight Cancer Research Building—and each has presented a different version of the same core challenge.
The KCRB video wall is the clearest example. Scientists and clinicians walk past it every single day. That creates a problem that most one-time campaigns don’t face: the work can’t announce itself, because people stop seeing things that announce themselves. It has to do something more subtle—communicate the institution’s research identity as a kind of ambient presence, something felt rather than read. Figuring out what that looks and moves like required understanding OHSU’s culture at a level that went well beyond the visual brief.
UC Berkeley — Giving Shape to Something That Doesn’t Have One Yet
The Berkeley Discovery initiative is exactly the kind of project that reveals whether an agency actually leads with strategy or just says it does. Berkeley Discovery spans multiple departments and research areas—it doesn’t have a single face, a single story, or a settled identity. The brief, essentially, was: make this feel real and coherent to audiences who have no existing frame for it.
You can’t design your way into that. You have to spend time understanding what the initiative actually is—its purpose, its participants, its relationship to Berkeley’s broader identity—before you can propose how to represent it. We spent a significant portion of the engagement just listening. The visual language that came out of that work needed to feel unmistakably Berkeley while opening space for something genuinely new. That tension is the job.
University of Oregon — Honoring a Legacy Without Freezing It
The Hall of Achievement project was a different kind of translation problem: not “what is this” but “how do you honor this without making it feel embalmed.” The University of Oregon’s Hall of Achievement carries decades of institutional history, and the interactive digital experience needed to hold that history in a way that felt alive rather than archival.
What that project reinforced—and what we find ourselves saying often—is that the people inside these institutions can feel when the work is surface-level. Alumni, faculty, long-tenured staff: they know what the institution actually is. They can tell immediately whether the creative partner understood it or just processed it. The standard for this kind of work is higher than it looks from the outside.
The One Question Worth Asking Any Education Branding Company
If you’re evaluating creative partners for a rebrand, campaign, or digital experience, there are a dozen reasonable criteria: relevant portfolio, cross-medium capability, process, budget, availability. All of those matter.
But the single question that most quickly separates the right partners from the wrong ones is this: “Do they start with questions or with concepts?”
An agency that comes back to a first meeting with early creative directions is telling you something important: they’re in the business of producing work, not understanding institutions. That’s not always a disqualifier for every kind of project—but for education and mission-driven branding, it’s a red flag. The translation has to come before the design. If the design comes first, you end up with something that looks right but doesn’t feel true.
The partners worth working with will ask uncomfortable questions. They’ll want to understand the internal tensions, the stakeholder dynamics, the history of previous brand efforts and why they did or didn’t work. That process takes longer and requires more from the institution. It’s also the only way to produce work that actually carries what the institution needs it to carry.
“Do they start with questions or with concepts? That’s the question that most quickly separates the right partners from the wrong ones.”
If Something Isn’t Quite Landing
In our experience, institutions that reach out about branding are rarely starting from zero. More often, there’s a rebrand that’s been stalled for longer than it should be, or a campaign that came back from the last agency feeling technically correct but somehow off. Sometimes it’s a new initiative that needs a visual identity and nobody’s quite sure where to start.
Those are the conversations we’re built for. Serenity Studios is a Portland creative studio specializing in brand, web, and video for institutions and mission-driven organizations—and we lead with strategy because we’ve learned the hard way that the translation has to come first.
If something isn’t quite landing, we’d like to hear about it. We’re happy to give you an honest read on what’s not working—no pitch, just a conversation. Get in touch.
