Playing with the brand to produce a zine-style booklet for LCF offer holders
- Written byBrand and Strategy team
- Published date 28 April 2025
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London College of Fashion’s (LCF) student marketing and recruitment (SMR) team put a creative spin on converting offer holders: together with Studio LP from our Creative Services Roster, they created a zine-style booklet for prospective students as part of an integrated marketing campaign called ‘Make it Fashion’.
The campaign title didn’t just serve as the name of the booklet — it became a flexible tagline that shaped all campaign materials across digital and print.
Here’s how the SMR team and Studio LP used a playful, bold take on LCF’s brand system to produce the ‘Make it Fashion’ print.
The brief
The main objective of the booklet was to:
- support 2024 conversion efforts by reaching offer holders in spring 2024, serving as the first piece of print collateral in this style.
- demonstrate the strength and reputation of LCF’s courses, which prepare students for a career across fashion.
- highlight LCF’s unique study offer to prospective students, with all programmes rooted in the fashion industry — spanning design, business, media, communication, research and more.
Working with the brand
Experimenting with new formats
LCF’s SMR team had previously worked with Studio LP on producing a lookbook presenting work from each course. This time, they wanted to push the format so they could include more information that applicant surveys had shown prospective students are interested in, such as employability and student life.
"We knew there was information our applicants wanted us to address and that we had a lot to say, but our digital channels didn’t really have the flexibility to communicate everything we wanted effectively,” says Adam Armstrong, Head of SMR at LCF.
While most modern brands lean towards digital marketing, Adam saw print as an opportunity — especially for an audience not inundated with physical mailouts.
“To get something physical and have something to hold and look at can be quite powerful. This way, parents and other influencers have more of a chance to see it as well. We can't underestimate that audience.”
Communicating the LCF brand through colour, images and tone of voice
To make the prospect of going to a world-leading fashion school feel less intimidating, the booklet purposely takes a light — you might even say cheeky — approach to its tone of voice and visuals.
“Part of why we wanted to have a bit of fun with it was to show that LCF is a friendly place. The feedback we often get at Open Days is that visitors are surprised that the people are really nice here!”
The campaign slogan ‘Make it Fashion’ developed by Studio LP became a flexible device used in conjunction with LCF’s key selling points as a College specialising in all things fashion:
- “At London College of Fashion, we take your university experience and make it fashion.”
- “Open Days. But make it fashion.”
- “Why MSc Cosmetic Science? Take a science course and make it fashion.”
A big focus of making LCF more approachable was the use of colour: all shades were selected from the brand palette, with predominantly black text used on white and colour backgrounds. To ensure legibility, white text was applied on black backgrounds and over some images. Rounded shapes and sticker-style callouts broke up information to make content more digestible.
"We wanted to make something that felt youthful, energetic and a little bit rebellious — a vibrant selection of colours from the palette would bring lots of energy so we used them across full pages for maximum impact," says Lauren Chalmers, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Studio LP.
Another way the booklet communicates the LCF brand is through the curation of images. To ensure diversity of people, courses and student work, imagery was sourced from our Image Library, UAL Showcase and LCF’s own image banks.
Adam says: "People want to feel some sort of emotional connection. So, we included lots of inspiring work and photography showing off our estates and workshop spaces with people having fun in them.”
Letting students tell LCF’s brand story through our messaging pillars
Prospective students are eager to know what life at LCF is really like — and who better to tell that story than current students?
The team worked closely with students to co-create meaningful content responding to LCF’s messaging pillars. While applicants may not be actively looking for these frameworks, they offer a helpful way to communicate what the College stands for.
“Our students aren't pledging allegiance to the pillars every day when they come in so that they know about it,” jokes Adam.
“But getting them to reflect on the pillars was really powerful because suddenly you’re getting evidence for how fashion shapes their lives (‘Fashion Shapes Lives’ is LCF’s first messaging pillar). They all had these stories about what it looked like to them and how it fed into their course.”
The booklet manages to centre the student voice while also containing essential information about staying safe, our estates, budgeting and more. The design and messaging have also been integrated into the College's wider marketing plans and adapted for email campaigns, social media assets, ads and notebooks, postcards and business cards given away on Open Days.
The result
The booklet was sent out to UK-based offer holders last spring, including a digital version for international audiences.
“We’re super happy with how it turned out and the feedback has been great. Our ambassadors said they wished they'd had something like this when they were applying! It gave us a real springboard into everything else that we're doing now and it got us really excited about how the College can communicate with offer holders and applicants in ways that we can have a bit of fun with.”
"The process of working with the Student Recruitment team has been very collaborative and we’ve worked closely to refine the design and ensure that whilst we were playing with the guidelines we were still on brand," says Lauren.
"We also produced the final booklet with our long-term print partners Park who did a fantastic job with the production. It was an all-around great team effort."
The positive impact of the project was also evidenced in last year’s survey results, where applicants reported that they were getting more of the information they were previously looking for. Building on last year’s success, the team has been working on a 2025 iteration of the campaign with updated stories, new images and even more colour.
Team credits
Student Recruitment and Marketing team at London College of Fashion
- Adam Armstrong, Head of Student Recruitment and Marketing.
- Natalie Ellis, Student Recruitment and Marketing Manager (working on the 2025 version).
- Jimena Rascon Azanedo, Student Recruitment and Marketing Officer.
- Tino Matienga, Student Recruitment and Marketing Officer.
- Georgina Darvall, Student Recruitment and Marketing Manager.
Studio LP
- Lauren Chalmers, Co-Founder and Creative Director
All featured images: 2024/25 Make it Fashion recruitment materials | Design: Studio LP
Using our brand consistently helps us connect with our audiences, building awareness and understanding. Research has consistently shown that our strong brand and reputation is the number one reason students apply to UAL.
To learn more about how our brand helps tell the story of who we are and what we want to achieve, get in touch at brand@arts.ac.uk.
