In my postgraduate studies, I spent a few months on branding as part of my MBA economics and marketing course at BPP Business School. The brilliant Christy Traore taught me amongst many people. I have subsequently done the BPP Law School LPC special elective on intellectual property (and commercial law) which was utterly brilliant. I also did the course for the College of Law in intellectual property. I have a rather unique multi-dimensional perspective on how corporates tackle branding, from both a client-perspective and a lawyer-perspective, but as I am a person I am hugely biased towards the stakeholder. Any reader of my twitter thread or this blog will safely know that.

The BPP ‘brand’ was launched earlier this year. On the popular BPP blog, a background to the launch of this new brand was given, earlier this year:

“As our offering continues to expand, we felt it was a good time to move towards a logo that better reflects the diversity of our student and customer base, which can range from UK school leavers to senior business professionals. We believe our new logo achieves this, combining as it does the gravitas of a heraldic shield with the modernity of a relative newcomer in the higher education sector.”

Font nerds like me will have spotted that the font of the BPP lettering is ‘Whitney’, by fontographer Hoefler and Frere-Jones. I was always surprised that BPP had not decided to use a bespoke font especially for its branding.

However, I am now wondering whether this is the same font as the new Microsoft logo – in which case Microsoft have not designed a special font either. The ‘i’ and ‘t’ on this particular font are distinctive, many font experts feel.

Either way, the logos of BPP and Microsoft are clearly distinctive because of the picture (the words are clearly different), and such logos put side-by-side would be most unlikely to cause confusion.