Royal Holloway — Digital Rebrand
Modernising the digital presence of one of the UK's most prestigious universities — and getting a complex institution to agree on what that meant
Redesigning a critical financial system for tens of thousands of pension scheme members
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The Problem
Royal Holloway, University of London has a reputation built over more than 150 years: a research-intensive institution set in a genuinely extraordinary campus, with a strong academic identity and an increasingly competitive position in UK higher education. Its digital presence wasn't keeping pace.
The existing site was outdated, hard to navigate, and failing to communicate the quality and character of the institution to the audiences that mattered most. Prospective students couldn't find what they needed. The visual language felt tired relative to competitor universities. And with accessibility compliance becoming a regulatory obligation rather than a nice-to-have, the pressure to act was both reputational and legal.
My Role
I led the project as Product Design Lead, working with a small design team across the full engagement. My responsibilities covered creative direction, UX and UI strategy, information architecture, research, workshop facilitation, and project management, as well as managing what turned out to be one of the most complex stakeholder environments of any project in the studio's history.
The Core Challenge
Universities are uniquely difficult clients. Royal Holloway isn't a single organisation with a single set of priorities. It's a constellation of faculties, departments, administrative teams, student services, and senior leadership, each with legitimate and sometimes competing claims on what the digital presence should do and who it should serve. Getting meaningful alignment across that structure, without letting the project be pulled apart, required sustained facilitation and a strategic framework that all parties could genuinely orient around.
The design problem itself, serving prospective students, current students, academic staff, researchers, and visitors on a single coherent platform, was genuinely complex. These audiences have fundamentally different needs, different mental models, and different reasons for being on the site. The central challenge was building an information architecture that served all of them without compromising the experience for any one group.
The Decisions That Mattered
We built the brief together before starting design. Given the breadth of stakeholder opinions, we ran structured workshops with representatives from across the university early on to establish agreed design principles and audience priorities. This wasn't just good process; it was essential. Having a documented, collectively owned brief meant that later design decisions could be anchored to something everyone had already signed up to, rather than being relitigated from scratch in every review meeting.
We made a deliberate, documented call to prioritise the prospective student journey. A university website that tries to serve everyone equally usually ends up serving nobody particularly well. We made an explicit decision, written down, presented to stakeholders, and agreed upon, to prioritise the prospective student journey as the primary use case: the one most directly affecting Royal Holloway's competitive position and recruitment. Every other audience was served, but not at the expense of that primary flow. Getting stakeholder buy-in for that hierarchy was itself a significant piece of work.
We embedded accessibility standards into the design system from the start. WCAG compliance for a public sector institution isn't optional, but the way it's approached makes an enormous difference to the result. Type scales, colour contrast, focus states, heading structures: all of it was designed in from the beginning, so that compliance was a natural output rather than a set of corrections applied under pressure at the end.
We built something the university could actually maintain. A rebrand only holds if the institution can apply it consistently after the agency leaves. We delivered a component-based design system with clear documentation and usage guidance, one that Royal Holloway's internal teams could build from and adapt without returning to us every time they needed something new.
Outcome
The redesigned Royal Holloway platform launched and was adopted as the standard across the wider university digital estate, a meaningful result in an environment where individual departments often resist centralised design decisions. Prospective student engagement improved following launch, and the project received positive feedback from senior stakeholders. What I'm proudest of is that the design system held. New pages still look like they belong to the same institution. That's harder to achieve than it sounds.