Brand identity · Education, London
London Business
Training Academy
A heraldic brand identity for a London college in the BMC global education group. A crest drawn from scratch, an Ocean navy and Phoenix red palette, and a full system built to scale across a network of campuses.
BMC
The global education group
1
Crest, drawn from scratch
2
Named brand colours
28
Pages in the brand book
The brief
A training college that needed to look the part
London Business Training Academy teaches professional courses to working people and to organisations that send their teams to train. In that market, credibility is everything. A prospective student is choosing who to trust with their career, and a procurement team is choosing who to put on an invoice.
The brief was to build an identity that earns that trust on sight. Something that looks like an established London institution, sits comfortably inside the wider BMC education group, and holds together whether it is on a lecturer’s business card or the side of a bus.
The crest
Heritage, drawn to hold up small
A shield built from academic symbols, with a construction grid behind it and a minimum size so it never turns to mush on a lanyard or a favicon.
Academy Navy
#1B2350
Ocean
#31292A
Phoenix
#BD1E2D
Paper White
#FFFFFF
What we shipped
One institution, head to toe
A heraldic crest
A shield split into book, key and tower motifs, drawn to read as a serious academic institution at a glance. It is the kind of mark that earns trust before a single word is read, which is exactly what a training college needs.
A disciplined system
Ocean navy and Phoenix red, Montserrat for clarity and a Times serif for authority, plus strict rules on clear space, minimum size and the things you must never do to the crest. Built to stay consistent across a global network of campuses.
A full application rollout
Business cards and lecturer ID, signage, branded merchandise, wall clocks, backpacks and full bus livery. Everything a student or a corporate client touches, designed to feel like one institution.
Rolled out across
Every touchpoint a student meets
How we approached it
Four calls that shaped the system
Authority you can see from across the room
Education is a trust purchase. People hand over money and time on the promise of a credential, so the brand has to look established before it looks modern. The crest does the heavy lifting: it signals heritage and seriousness instantly.
One academy, many campuses
LBTA sits inside the BMC group, which runs professional training across multiple cities. The system was built to scale: a crest and a rulebook tight enough that a campus in one country looks like the same institution as a campus in another.
Modern where it counts
A traditional crest can tip into stuffy fast. Montserrat keeps the everyday materials clean and current, so the brand reads as a working, present-day academy rather than a museum piece. The serif is used sparingly, for weight, not nostalgia.
Designed to be applied, not interpreted
A network this size cannot have every campus reinventing the brand. The guidelines are prescriptive on purpose, with named colours, fixed type and clear prohibited uses, so consistency survives across teams and borders.
Part of the BMC group
Built to sit inside a global education network
London Business Training Academy is part of BMC, a professional education group that has been running training since 1996 and delivers courses across cities including London, Dubai and Istanbul. That parentage shaped the work. The identity had to feel like its own academy while still belonging to something larger.
So we built for a network, not a one-off. A crest and a rulebook tight enough to travel, flexible enough to front a campus anywhere the group operates, and consistent enough that a student in one city recognises the same institution in another.
Need a brand that earns trust on sight?
Education, professional services, anything where credibility closes the sale. We build identities that look established from day one and scale across a network.