BBE Communications

Education is a path. A difficult one. But it can also be exhilarating. The goal of BBE communications was to show that path to prospective and current students through clear, engaging design, letting them see how alive the journey could feel and inviting them to take it themselves. The team thought of itself as a beacon along the way.

BBE was never purely a commercial entity. It was a living, breathing community of enthusiasts, anchored by a set of foundational ideas and beliefs spelled out in the school manifesto.

The school's design system was built on the foundations of Bauhaus and Swiss design. Sans-serif typography and a grid-based structure lie at its heart. The system's base was defined to set boundaries and a working framework, while leaving deliberate room for creative freedom. The result was a highly experimental practice growing out of a classical foundation.

Each product had its own flavor and ecosystem. The job was to foster them and make each one distinct yet still part of the BBE family. Embedded visual cues and metaphors hinted at those differences, so the work could stay unpredictable while remaining recognizable.

Explaining the products to a wider audience was a critical part of the job: holding the front line of marketing while still being useful, educational, and entertaining. During the years at BBE we launched hundreds of webinars and day-long webinar sets we called festivals. Each one needed its own visual design and promotional posts, and we tried to deliver something special every time.

Guides, cheat sheets, articles. The goal was to be useful to the audience. Even sale posts were something bigger than a discount: an opportunity for students to join the school on better terms, and an opportunity for us to build striking imagery worth lingering over.

Internal education and mentoring mattered just as much. We constantly pushed the envelope, experimented with new media, and brought craft into everything. Lettering workshops were a regular practice, and their results often ended up in the school's actual communications.

My time at BBE was an unusual opportunity to build something bigger. To help other people. To experiment, to try new media, to push the work somewhere new. It was also the first time in my career I got to build a team of my own, guide it, and watch what we made together grow into something none of us could have made alone.