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This is how Lovework Studio made ed-tech feel at home in universities
The collaboration between Lovework Studio and Cadmus highlights the importance of a tailored brand strategy that resonates with diverse university stakeholders. By evolving Cadmus's identity to reflect a modern yet sophisticated aesthetic, the brand successfully connects with its audience while standing out in the competitive ed-tech landscape, ultimately enhancing user experience and institutional credibility.
The Brand Identity: Ed-tech branding speaks in one of two dialects. There’s the corporate SaaS voice – dashboard interfaces, gradient buttons and stock photography. Then there’s the playful start-up – chunky sans serifs, bright primaries and funky illustrations. Cadmus, an Australian platform providing end-to-end assessment solutions for universities across Australia, the UK and US, needed something else. Their users span institutional administrators, stressed academics and students wrestling with deadlines.
The visual language of tech infrastructure wouldn’t serve any of them well. Lovework Studio, a remote branding and digital design studio founded by Robyn and Campbell Butler, spent nine months working side-by-side with the Cadmus team to transform every aspect of the brand – strategy, identity, digital design, website, social, communications and events.
The Butlers have been running branding and digital projects for 20 years across Europe, Asia and Australia, operating with a core team spread across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, supplemented by an international network of specialists. The original Cadmus identity featured a quill, already well established as an icon for their assessment platform among university clients. Rather than abandon this equity, Lovework chose to evolve it. The quill has been tilted to 45 degrees and streamlined, brought to life through animation that sees it moving with flourish – as if wielded by a busy academic rather than sitting dormant on a page.
“The quill is also used as a dynamic supergraphic for animations and printed applications,” Creative Director Campbell Butler explains. This single mark now carries weight across static and digital contexts without feeling like a symbol borrowed from a medieval manuscript. The colour palette draws from an unexpected source. Renaissance-era paintings provided the reference point – rich, deep tones colour-picked from works created during a period when education thrived.
“The rich paintings from this time often featured academics and writers with fluffy quills and feathers in their caps,” Butler shares, “so that it didn’t feel stuffy – we created renaissance style illustrations but featuring modern day students and academics juggling with their phones or snuggling with their cat.” These illustrations, crafted in-house by Tyler Russell, add levity to what could easily feel like a heavy, institutional brand. The process began through mixed media collage – bringing together modern photographs of phones with renaissance paintings before tracing everything using a quill-like brush.
The resulting artwork was then vectorised and colourised with the brand colours to ensure flexibility across different scales and digital scenarios. The illustrations provide moments of fun within the product experience and communications, helping to create what the team describes as a more uplifting experience for university assessment. The typographic system balances historical reference with contemporary function. Realm, a semi-serif headline typeface designed by Approximate Type, blends influences from Old English lettering, Roman capitals and round-hand calligraphy.
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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort in the ed-tech sector, which is relevant to brand strategy professionals, but the concepts presented are not entirely groundbreaking in the context of branding practices.