University of Birmingham | Smart Campus
Jessica Stephenson
Editorial Design | University of Birmingham
The Smart Campus
The University of Birmingham set out to create the world’s smartest campus — a fully connected environment designed to enhance the experience for students, staff, academics, and visitors.
The Smart Campus initiative supports the University’s strategic goals: achieving Net Zero Carbon, building a Living Lab for research, and enabling data-driven decision making across every part of campus life.
Our role was to bring this vision to life visually through a comprehensive Smart Campus brochure and supporting visuals for a promotional video.
The Challenge
The brief was to make a complex, data-heavy concept clear and engaging.
We needed to communicate innovation, sustainability, and connection in a way that felt both aspirational and accessible to a wide audience.
The Design
The brochure became the visual core of the campaign.
Its layout was built around clarity, rhythm, and storytelling. Combining text, data, and illustration to show how technology, people, and sustainability intersect on campus.
Our mission was to visually articulate the University's vision through the creation of a comprehensive Smart Campus brochure and accompanying visuals for a promotional video.
Link below to view brochure
"The design was the catalyst for having the conversation with internal stakeholders who didn’t understand smart campus to properly buy into it."
–Trevor Payne: University of Birmingham
Each page was designed to guide the reader through the Smart Campus ecosystem. Colour, iconography, and hierarchy worked together to communicate scale and sophistication while keeping the message grounded in human experience.
The same visual system extended into a promotional video, produced by an external team using our storyboards and original illustrations. The video translated the brochure’s visual language into motion, creating consistency across every touchpoint.
The Outcome
The Smart Campus brochure and visuals became a central communication tool for the University.
They helped secure support from internal teams, academic departments, and external stakeholders by transforming a complex technological vision into something clear, engaging, and inspiring.
The project demonstrated how strong design can turn data into narrative and strategy into story.
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Posted Jan 7, 2026
Created the visual narrative for the UoB Smart Campus translating a complex, data-driven vision into a clear, engaging brochure and campaign visuals.
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