Inspiring the young minds of tomorrow

Sir Winston Churchill once said: “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction”

It is this philosophy that governed the College of Cape Town’s decision to evolve our current brand, to create a new logo and positioning that will establish us as leaders in education.

Looking at where we’ve come from, the College of Cape Town was the result of a merger between four technical colleges. The logo that was designed at that time symbolised this “coming together”, embracing all four colleges in its design.

Today, more than 7 years on, the time has come for us to move forward, to refresh our brand identity and address the views and expectations of our stakeholders, students and the broader community we operate in.

With the College of Cape Town’s institutional goals, it was important for us to re-evaluate our current logo and rejuvenate our brand in order to meet our objectives.

Change is never easy, so to ensure that we did make it for the better, a detailed Strategic Brand Review was undertaken to gain understanding of the strength of the current brand, and to get some insight into the perceptions amongst internal and external stakeholders.

To assist us in this vital process, we approached DANIDA who, through their Support to Education and Skills Development Project, funded all the research to ensure that the correct decisions were made in taking us into our new and exciting future.

With the help of staff, students, council, industry partners, and even prospective students, valuable insights were gained in the search for our new brand.

The brand:
With the fundamental aspects of Vision and Mission in place, we focussed our attention on creating a new positioning line for the College of Cape Town. A slogan that would communicate our “reason for being”, our brand essence – a few well selected words that would tell interested parties what it is we stand for and what it is we want to achieve.

We were ready to move on from “Learning for life” and to create a slogan that would communicate our commitment to inspire young minds to fill the skills gap and achieve their ambitions through further education and training at the College of Cape Town. At the same time we also want to inspire staff through the success of these youngsters.

“Inspiring minds” was the slogan that inspired us most and we trust that it will do the same for both staff and students for years to come!

The next step in the rebranding exercise was to update our current logo. Through extensive research with various focus groups, we learned that the reasoning behind our initial logo design was still very relevant in today’s society. The strong red circle which represents the College of Cape Town epitomizes a symbol of strength in the education arena and specifically the FET Colleges sector. As we continue to strive to be the leader in innovation and technology and the growth epicentre of FET Colleges in the Western Cape, we believe that the red circle is still very much applicable to our new brand positioning.

The most prominent change to the logo is the introduction of the strong secondary colour – black. By moving away from the multi-coloured dots, we emphasise the strong relationship we have with the communities in which we operate. These include not only student communities, but also groups such as industry, SETAs and government. The strong unity between the red centre circle and the black dots indicates that the College of Cape Town has very strong ties with these sectors of society and that we will continue to foster good relationships with all our students and stakeholders.

The combination of this bold, striking logo and our new, emotive slogan, communicates the College of Cape Town’s commitment to take on the challenge of becoming the preferred provider of Further Education and Training through embracing the principles of Ubuntu and INSPIRING MINDS.