Association for Institutional Research
For more than 50 years, The Association for Institutional Research (AIR) has empowered higher education professionals to leverage data, analytics, information, and evidence to make decisions and take actions that benefit students and institutions around the globe. As a global association, AIR came to Red Orange in need of brand strategy and a new logo that would properly represent their cutting-edge, data-centric mission and various sub-branded initiatives. They also wanted to showcase their new visual identity with a full redesign of their outdated website.
Creative Services
Brand Strategy & Architecture
Logo Design
Website Design
Email Templates
PowerPoint Template
Print Design
Collaborative Approach
The Red Orange team worked collaboratively with the AIR team to develop a new logo mark that supports the client vision to be a global leader in educating, leading and empowering individuals in higher ed. In addition, we incorporated brand guidelines for AIR’s sub-brands, including AIRHub, an online member learning platform, and AIRForum, the organization’s flagship membership event. We also collaborated with AIR’s current CMS and development team to integrate the refreshed web elements. We were able to leverage the client’s internal resources by partnering with their internal graphic designer to efficiently integrate the new brand across various print and digital collateral, serving as a true brand partner.
Solution
The logo mark combines the idea of data and graphs with the concept of air and community. It represents the data and research that is collected, shared and disseminated into the wider institutional community. The circle shape points to the idea that AIR is a hub and academic community of people interacting together. The use of lowercase letters provided a fresh new look that resonates with an increasingly younger membership.
As a brand partner working with our client’s in-house designer, we developed a comprehensive brand style guide that enabled the AIR team to create new content for the website that follows the brand standards and provides consistency. In addition to the rebrand, the Red Orange team led the redesign of the website and produced updated collateral materials including email templates, digital reports, social media graphics, case studies and presentations.
The PowerPoint template was designed for use in internal and externally facing presentations. The presentation featured multiple versions of slides with placeholder text, photos and graphs that the AIR team could replace independently with real world data, organizational values and timelines, as well as team photos. Each slide in the template was crafted to echo AIR’s new brand colors, shapes, fonts and icons. Reflecting the organization’s brand elements throughout the template now allows all future presentations to remain consistent with AIR’s refreshed identity.
In addition to servicing AIR with web and digital marketing as their brand partner, we designed The AIR Professional File in 2019 and 2020. This quarterly publication is a peer-reviewed publication in which members write articles that are published and reviewed by other members. We created a template that AIR’s internal team could use to update on a quarterly basis. We intentionally applied design solutions to make the dense academic content more digestable and also meet the client’s specific criteria for articulating data clearly and accurately. Moreover, we helped to boost the document’s digital visibility via online search by extracting individual articles as stand-alone documents and HTML web pages.
Outcome
As an ongoing brand partner, Red Orange continues to help execute tactics outlined in the organization’s rebrand strategy. We provide design and marketing support for eAIR, the organization’s email marketing newsletter, social media graphics and digital assets for AIR’s first virtual Forum. In addition, we continue to update AIR collateral such as the annual report and case studies to ensure brand consistency.
