Wielding the brand, in universities

Communication has always had the bad reputation of being a device of ordering: well, it is. Communicating, as we know, also means selecting, ranking, making recognisable: all functions that sit comfortably alongside principles of power and exclusion. And yet a visual identity system as a system of ordering cannot in itself be a problem, and anyone tearing their clothes because the rules of communication, with their inevitable simplifications, are applied in universities too can only look suspect: organisations articulated into departments, centres, courses, projects and different audiences need common rules, even if we granted that the debate on design as a form of discipline and reduction remains open. Universities still live in considerable informational chaos, websites first of all, and the matter concerns language too, not only visual codes.

It is worth recalling what a brandbook actually does, an object that is the purest distillate of this supposed disciplining of communication.

A brandbook is a document that can hold together, depending on the design choices made, two distinct levels. On one side the technical part: mark, colours, typefaces, naming, brand architecture, rules for keeping the websites of an ecosystem consistent. It is uncontroversial material that solves real problems: without these rules a large organisation loses hours of its life deciding whether the logo goes at the top or the bottom. On the other side there is the narrative part, more contentious, and it is on this part that the objections at the University of Padua concentrated: "brand essence", declared values, tone of voice, and in some cases, as at Padua, a "portfolio of words". Here the document stops describing visual conventions and starts prescribing a posture towards language and modes of expression that the whole academic community is supposed to adopt.

The case of the Politecnico di Milano, which has also recently undergone a deep revision of its visual identity, is interesting because the university states that the process was fully participatory: three cycles of focus groups, twenty-four users involved among students, staff and outsiders, co-design with a specialist partner, a design system applied to nine university sites. And we know how far participatory design methods, as well as being useful, also work as mechanisms of legitimation: "we did it together, so you cannot object to it".

Downstream of the process, however, the Politecnico's document too opens its pages with a declaration of brand essence, target, values and tone of voice: the convention of the genre, inherited wholesale from the corporate world, is therefore not dissolved by the quality of the method adopted in a process that was certainly long and complex. The problem, for those who see one, is if anything one of cultural model.

The brandbook we built for the University of Siena, published in March 2025 by the agency Dinamo together with LCD studio of Florence, sits within the same genre, but tried to tighten it. There is an opening manifesto, there are declared values, there is a page on tone of voice. But that page stops at four short principles ("speaks seriously", "is respectful of others", "does not get lost in formalities", "speaks clearly") and no more: no portfolio of words, no tables of preferred and forbidden adjectives, no triple oppositions. Eighty of the document's one hundred and ten pages are the technical part. The choice was to keep linguistic prescription at the highest possible level, recognising that a plural body of academics and researchers cannot be disciplined like a marketing function.

It is a compromise internal to a genre that is hard to escape entirely. The narrative part of a brandbook is a convention the commissioning party often expects, and a manual entirely without one would, in my view, look incomplete. But there is a margin of choice as to the depth of the prescription, and at Padua that margin was probably used in the opposite direction.

The critical point of ordering models such as those expressed in brandbooks is which model you adopt to create order. Often the most readily available is the corporate one, because that is where contemporary branding has developed its vocabulary and its homogenising rhetoric: the unconscious of communication, source of the glossy smiles, the injunctions to identify, the idea that every institution must present itself as a compact subject, immediately desirable and consumable.

At Padua the signatories of the document recognised and denounced that model. The brandbook calls for "a crystalline voice, able to express clearly who we are". It defines a tone that is "engaging but never dramatic", "celebratory but not boastful", "friendly but never brash". It provides a "portfolio of words": tables of adjectives and nouns that "resonate coherently with the personality outlined". It changes the official name, from Università degli studi di Padova to Università di Padova, because the first does not translate well into English. The group Università libera also points out that the document was drafted without consulting the university's own academic areas working specifically on language, communication and translation. For a university, that is a misstep that speaks for itself.

The problem is not that this material resembles a bank's brandbook. It is that university and bank are treated by agencies as the same kind of subject: an entity with a personality, a tone, values that can be set out in a table. A university is not a compact subject: it is a research community in which internal dissent is a condition of the work. Demanding "a single voice" is a descriptive error before it is a political one.

Over time the logics of corporate communication have settled into people. We know them: the continuous production of the self, the need to make oneself recognisable, desirable, high-performing. And then the personalisation of politics, of culture, of academic careers. Universities arrived late and somewhat breathless: important but disorderly, authoritative but not very accessible, full of content but distant from the languages of students, media and local communities. Hence the more or less declared panic: we must improve, become legible, build systems, guidelines, formats, a tone of voice. Some of it is genuinely needed; it is a matter of not ending up in the grotesque.

Padua is certainly not an isolated case. In December 2012 the University of California withdrew its new monogram after a petition with over 30,000 signatures: students and alumni were saying, simply, that a public university is not a start-up. Similar cases are well documented in the literature on higher education branding: Hemsley-Brown and Oplatka made a systematic review of it as early as 2006, and Bill Readings in 1996, with The University in Ruins, had grasped the underlying movement much earlier. All converge on one point: whoever leads the communication of a public institution has to know which communicative tradition they are drawing on. There are models other than the corporate one (public service, scientific publishing, civic engagement, even the museum), but they have to be chosen rather than inherited out of laziness or the absence of any alternative close to hand.