This is how Lovework Studio made ed-tech feel at home in universities

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.