Mastering Our Craft
Some client relationships go deeper than a single project. Our work with Access Creative College, England's largest private creative training provider, has grown over years and across cities, and by the time we reached this chapter, we knew them inside out. Their mission, their students, their culture, what makes their model work.
That depth of knowledge changes everything. When you truly understand what an organisation is trying to do in the world, you can design in service of that not just alongside it. ACC's goal is to be the number one choice for creative training in the UK, and with outcomes that speak for themselves, near-universal graduate employment across every subject area, the quality of what they do was never in question. The job was to make sure the world could see it with 2 briefs running in tandem, a refreshed brand identity and promotional materials and the design of a new campus in Bristol.
Refreshing the Brand
A rebrand is never just about a new logo. Done well, it's an act of strategic clarity, a moment to step back, understand where the business is going, and make sure everything the organisation says and shows is pointing in the same direction.
That was the work here. We dug deep into ACC's vision, growth objectives, and the values that unite their campuses, staff, and students. From that foundation, we developed a brand strategy that clarified their core messages and gave the whole organisation a shared language to grow into.
The visual identity that followed was built to feel alive and human, not institutional or transactional. Central to that was the decision to put the people of ACC at the heart of the brand. We collaborated with photographer Olivier Richomme to create a suite of photography that captures the spirit and personality of staff and students in an authentic, unguarded way. Real people, real moments, real creative energy.
That imagery runs through everything, from the new course prospectus to the identity guidelines that now give every campus a consistent, confident visual voice.
Creating the Environement
The Bristol campus sits in a building with a story.
The Bierkeller, one of Bristol's most legendary venues, and the site of Nirvana's first UK gig, closed in 2018 and lay dormant until ACC transformed it into a £5 million, 12,000 sq ft creative campus in the heart of Broadmead. Our fifth interior project with ACC, and by some distance the most layered.
The brief was a substantial expansion across two floors: specialist spaces where students can learn, create, perform, rehearse, play with new technology, and connect with each other. The scope runs from photo studios, green screen rooms, and production pods to performance spaces and social areas, everything a young creative needs under one roof, in a city that has been shaping music and culture for decades. Bristol is the largest centre for creativity in the South West of England, the campus needed to feel worthy of that context.
Delivered in two phases, the project is connected across space and time by something we couldn't resist: A mysterious tunnel linking the two halves of the building. It's a detail that perfectly captures what the best creative education environments should feel like, a little unexpected, a little theatrical, and completely memorable.
Positive Momentum
The Bristol campus opened as phase one of what ACC describe as a plan to welcome more courses and more students while building on Bristol's creative future. The early results reflect exactly that ambition, a space that feels as bright, colourful and exciting as the city it sits in, drawing students from across the South West into an environment purpose-built for the kind of hands-on, industry-connected learning that gets people into careers.
The rebrand, meanwhile, gave the whole organisation a sharper, more confident way to tell its story, one that reflects where ACC has arrived, not just where it started. When the numbers are this strong, near-universal graduate employment across every subject area, the brand's job is simply to make sure nobody misses it.
For us, this project is a reminder of what long-term creative partnerships make possible. The more you know a client, the more precisely you can serve them. After five campuses and a full rebrand, we know ACC very well indeed.
