Gendall Design
City Academy
Brand, Print & Web design

The art of the possible

Established in 2006, City Academy are the only creative and performing arts academy that make creativity simple to explore, by offering performing arts and creative classes and courses at a range of levels, for people from all walks of life in prestigious venues across London, designed to inspire people to realise their full potential in a fun and supportive atmosphere.

The brief
The challenge for City Academy with an already established and successful brand was to keep the valuable position the brand already occupied, whilst clarifying their personality and areas of experience to customers through distinctive messaging to inspire and deliver a reassurance that they are the only choice in performing and creative art classes.

  1. User experience

    Enhancing user journey experience for the time conscious user, and improving conversion rates.

  2. Marketing collateral

    A range of marketing comms, including a business facing corporate events brochure.

  3. Website design

    Refocussing the core offering of City Academy whilst making the site visually engaging and fun was one of the core brief fundamentals.

  4. Constant improvement

    Working closely with City Academy's Digital Team, we've rolled out further enhancements to the website including a new checkout.

We commissioned Gendall to redesign our website and a range of print materials. They have always been a pleasure to work with and we have been consistently impressed with the quality of their work
Mike Ward - MD

Bringing it all online

A new website and digital communications.

Event programmes

With over 12,000 classes to choose from, we conceptualised a set of handout programmes.

Microsite

The performance bootcamp microsite with DeObia Oparei.

Brand Application

Advertising banners at the Regent Street festival in 2014.

Creative process

Working alongside City Academy we defined and and developed their personality and visual brand language.

Prototyping

We carried out rapid whiteboard prototyping with the development team to help us clarify the user journey.

Style tiles

As part of our discovery work we created a set of style tiles to help us define and deliver the wider brand story.

Iteration

Through the re-design of a new user friendly website we enhanced emotional engagement and user experience by re-engineering the online user journeys to give a broader experience of everything City Academy has to offer, as well as improving customer follow up by streamlining the checkout process.

The Results

  • 18%

    rise in traffic to the website

  • 20%

    increase in sales

  • 72%

    increase in mobile traffic

  • 60%

    increase in mobile transactions

The next chapter

City Academy's business school designs and delivers unique business courses and training including Communication Skills, Team Building and Event experiences rooted in the performing and creative arts. Working with the corporate team at City Academy, we identified the need for a different look and feel to the public side of the business.

Corporate brochure

The City Academy corporate brochure targetted medium to large organisations in creating unique corporate experiences. For example, City Academy worked in collaboration with British Airways on a rewards programme to help select employees to fulfil their dream of acting in and producing a film! Actor Richard E Grant compered the day and employees spent half the day learning to act, and the other half learning how to make a film.