As we dug into discovery, we realized that the college’s previous visual identity wasn’t successfully capturing the true essence of Holy Cross (and wasn’t being widely adopted on campus). To help the brand resonate more clearly, our team simplified and refreshed Holy Cross’ core identity elements, leaning into existing legacy assets that were already working well for the Holy Cross community: its name, its historical seal, and of course, its signature purple.

During our brand discovery process, we realized that Holy Cross had a unique opportunity to abbreviate its logotype from “College of the Holy Cross” to “Holy Cross.” At only nine characters, this name shift allowed the College’s wordmark to work better in small space and social media applications, and feel stronger against its comp set.

The world is changing fast, but the traditions and values that have guided and inspired generations of Holy Cross students are more relevant than ever. We worked side by side with Holy Cross’ communications team and external creative partners to fine tune messaging and submessages within their audience segmentation to make their Jesuit story resonate with a wide range of stakeholders.

A critical component of our brand strategy work involved clarifying Holy Cross’ complex brand ecosystem. By defining consistent visual treatments for each entity type (brand extensions, affiliate brands, etc), we significantly reduced the workload of Holy Cross’ internal design team, and at the same time, built additional brand equity for the Holy Cross parent brand.

Our brand work set the foundation for the new Holy Cross website, with Moth playing a key role in early ideation and helping to define the creative direction from the start.

To ensure the new Holy Cross brand can be easily accessed by brand stakeholders across campus, we built a standards site that provides clear brand guidelines, examples of the brand in use and downloadable brand assets and files.