The Vienna Graduate School of Finance launches its new corporate design and website

The Vi­enna Gradu­ate School of Fin­ance (VGSF) has launched its new brand to ex­hibit the de­termin­a­tion of the in­sti­tu­tion to con­tinue and fur­ther en­hance its PhD pro­gram in Fin­ance as an act of col­lab­or­a­tion between the three found­ing in­sti­tu­tions and as a place for hard-­work­ing and fo­cused stu­dents.

The new VGSF brand de­liv­ers a num­ber of key mes­sages in order to en­gage a vari­ety of audi­ences. The new logo has a clean and power­ful design that com­ple­ments the VGSF val­ues of Ex­cel­lence, Inde­pend­ence, and En­cour­age­ment.

“Right from the be­gin­ning, it was im­port­ant to us that the new logo and col­ors should clearly com­mu­nic­ate our re­search fo­cus, our goals, and the pas­sion stu­dents put into their work,” says Alex Mürmann (Pro­gram Dir­ector).

A color makeover

The VGSF logo com­bines the col­ors black and red in its design. The logo is mainly black, but the color red is pre­dom­in­ant in the design. Red is an in­tense color that sym­bol­izes ded­ic­a­tion, cour­age, and power. In ad­di­tion, the color red in­dic­ates the loca­tion of the school, hav­ing a place in the Aus­trian and Vi­en­nese flags.

“After a few logo drafts with di­verse blue shades, we real­ized that we were in­ter­ested in a more power­ful color to com­bine with the color black that could bet­ter rep­res­ent the en­ergy and pas­sion re­quired to com­plete a PhD pro­gram. This color also puts VGSF on the in­ter­na­tional map, as it strengthens the con­nec­tion with the loca­tion of the school, Vi­enna and Aus­tria,” says Laura Mal­in­verno (Pro­ject Man­ager).

The “brack­ets” as a con­tainer of know­ledge and ori­gin­ator of ideas

The logo plays with a dual in­ter­pret­a­tion of the brack­ets. Brack­ets are com­monly used in mathem­at­ics, and they are fre­quently found in re­search pa­pers. The brack­ets con­tain VGSF as a sym­bol of en­clos­ure and en­deavor to push the fron­tier of know­ledge. Ad­di­tion­ally, the square brack­ets also de­pict an open box as an in­vit­a­tion for the ex­change and devel­op­ment of ideas.

A new web­site to com­mu­nic­ate our ex­pert­ise

With the new cor­por­ate design, VGSF cre­ated a new web­site that is meant to dis­play con­tent in a user­-­friendly and in­tu­it­ive way. The homepage ad­dresses dif­fer­ent audi­ences and dir­ects them to the chief work­ing areas of the School: the PhD pro­gram and its stu­dents, the fac­ulty of the three Vi­en­nese in­sti­tu­tions, and the sem­inars that bring top in­ter­na­tional re­search­ers to VGSF. The homepage also high­lights the School as an act of col­lab­or­a­tion between the three found­ing in­sti­tu­tions that form the back­bone of VGSF.

“We’re ex­cited about the mo­mentum our new brand will cre­ate, both in­tern­ally and ex­tern­ally,” says Mürmann. “It cap­tures the essence of the School and it will fur­ther strengthen our pres­ence in the in­ter­na­tional mar­ket.”