Features

How a decade-old AI veteran stands apart from the noise

With its decade of AI expertise at risk of being overshadowed by newcomers and hype, Faculty turned to Koto to redefine its identity. Abbey Bamford explores how the rebrand captures duality, trust and real-world impact at the frontier of intelligent technology.

In a sea of AI startups and opportunistic rebrands, Faculty had a different story to tell. Long before artificial intelligence became a boardroom buzzword or sparked existential headlines, Faculty had already been quietly shaping the real-world application of machine learning. Founded in 2014 in London, the company began with a clear mission: to bring academic rigour to industry, enabling PhDs and researchers in Stem subjects to transition from theoretical work to meaningful impact in the field. Over the last decade, Faculty has deployed AI to solve some of society's most complex challenges, from crisis response to climate innovation.

Yet, as AI exploded into mainstream consciousness following the release of ChatGPT, Faculty found itself at risk of being lost in the noise. Faculty’s marketing lead, Thomas Davies, says, “We’d been doing this for ten years working at the cutting edge of AI, but suddenly everyone was talking about AI. Competitors were spinning up overnight, and we needed to make sure our depth of expertise wasn’t drowned out by the hype.”

Though Faculty wasn’t a newcomer, this was unclear from a visual and strategic point of view. The previous brand leaned on a minimal, monochrome aesthetic, a look that had once signalled seriousness but had since become synonymous with a generic B2B consultancy. Davies explains, “Our old brand was born out of being a 70-person startup. Over time, some colour was added, but the identity never really evolved with the business and we’d outgrown it.” Ultimately, it no longer reflected the scale, ambition and credibility of the company it had become. That’s when the team approached global creative company Koto to help reinforce Faculty’s reputation as a pioneer in applied AI.

Koto senior strategist Cat Hill notes, “The category is dominated by consultancies – people trust them – but consultancies don’t offer the same cutting-edge technical capability that Faculty does. That, paired with its 10-year history, makes it the leader in applied AI.”

Leveraging legacy

One of the central strategic challenges was how to balance Faculty’s academic depth and engineering excellence with its forward-facing ambition. While many competitors leaned into sci-fi tropes or the tired binary of ‘human + machine,’ Koto took a different approach. They elevated Faculty’s legacy, not as nostalgia, but as credibility, landing on the ‘Frontier AI for the Frontlines of the World’ positioning, which distils the company’s unique ability to connect cutting-edge research with real-world outcomes.

“The category is full of businesses undertaking research or building tools,” says Hill. “Faculty does both the thinking and the doing. That brand line was born from the idea of putting theory into practice.”

This notion of duality became the north star of the brand strategy and creative execution: past and future, intellect and action, control and possibility. Faculty, as Davies puts it, isn’t interested in building AI for its own sake. “Our mission is to safely deliver AI into the world, and we see humans always being in the loop. AI is a tool that augments, not replaces.”

For Koto, building trust wasn’t just a design challenge, it was a cultural one. “It comes down to having a good understanding of the audience and the cultural context the brand exists in,” says Hill. “Everything from the ethics to the application of AI is and will increasingly be discussed and scrutinised. Knowing people are apprehensive and sometimes accusatory about AI meant we needed to create a brand strategy that could stand up to it.” This explains the clear vision for the brand – ‘safely deliver the AI revolution’ – which serves as a reassuring way to communicate that Faculty are holding themselves responsible and working to mitigate the risks associated with AI.

The design, led by Koto’s team including design director Issey Conway, leans heavily into the space between extremes. From iconography to layout, the identity is shaped by a kind of tension, carefully balancing structure with expression. At the heart of the identity is the idea of the ‘threshold’ – a powerful metaphor for Faculty which was developed into a graphic motif, marking the moment where possibility becomes progress. It features prominently across the system, from the crossbar in the logotype to the layout of web pages and motion design. Its repetition creates cohesion while reinforcing the idea of moving from frontier to frontline.

“We needed to express duality in a way that felt deliberate, not literal,” says Conway. “The identity had to work across sectors, stay consistent without being repetitive and feel both authoritative and adaptable.”

A truly custom design

The ‘f’ symbol at the heart of the identity is deceptively simple, yet conceptually rich. It acts as a visual shorthand for the brand’s core idea – the threshold between innovation and impact – while subtly nodding to Faculty’s roots in data and logic. Its symmetry and precision suggest balance, echoing the company’s commitment to both technological rigour and responsible application. Rather than being just a letterform, it becomes a consistent stamp of intent, marking Faculty’s presence across digital, print and product with clarity and meaning.

Faculty’s custom typeface, Faculty Glyphic, embodies this same ethos. Inspired by early British modernist typography – including Berthold Wolpe’s Albertus and the work of Edward Johnston – the typeface nods to a pioneering era in British design and mathematics, and was designed in-house at Koto. “It’s a distinctive voice in a category full of sleek futurism,” says Conway. “It grounds the brand while still looking ahead.”

The typeface was optimised for digital use and built to flex across the identity, from technical product interfaces to marketing materials. It stands apart with a character that is both classic yet distinctive.

The palette also carries this tension, blending grounded, heritage-inspired tones with brighter, more vibrant colours that imply modernity and confidence. Elsewhere, illustration is used selectively to bring moments of expression and warmth to an otherwise clean and structured system.

Koto also developed a custom gradient generation tool in partnership with digital studio Planes. These gradients introduce movement and tactility to Faculty’s digital presence and echo the brand’s positioning: always transitioning from abstract potential to tangible application.

The launch of Faculty’s new website helped solidify this transformation. Designed as more than a digital brochure, it takes cues from classic editorial design, signalling Faculty’s ambition to lead industry conversations. “They wanted a site execs could visit regularly, not just one you land on to check services,” says Conway. Inspired by newspapers and magazines, the site features mastheads, editorial grids and bold typography, paired with interactive elements that echo Faculty’s gradient system. The result is a platform that fuses authority and innovation, and is equal parts thought leadership hub and brand showcase.

Defining the future of AI

Internally, the reaction to the rebrand was initially mixed, however, once the brand strategy was shared through workshops and town halls, the logic behind the change resonated. “Once people made the connection between the strategy and the visuals, they really embraced it,” says Davies. “We’ve seen much better uptake this time around, and there’s pride in it.”

The rollout also included a new brand centre, internal swag and a coffee table book: 10 Lessons from Ten Years, written with a novelist and designed as a physical expression of the new brand. Davies describes it as “a high-quality object that shows AI isn’t just abstract theory,” and instead foregrounds Faculty’s appreciation for storytelling and craftsmanship.

What ultimately makes the Faculty rebrand distinctive is its restraint, as it doesn’t shout for attention or hide behind jargon. Instead, it favours clarity and depth to convey a powerful message: that the future of AI won’t be defined by spectacle, but by responsibility, craft and credibility. “It’s a brand that holds complexity without becoming complicated,” Conway reflects. “That’s what defines Faculty, and that’s what we worked hardest to capture.”

The messaging avoids hype and speaks directly to the audience’s mindset (what Koto calls the ‘pragmatic visionary’). These are people who are excited about AI’s potential but grounded enough to see through the unfamiliar tech lingo. Hill reinforces, “We wanted the brand to be visionary, but always practical, so it had to be insightful but also clear and human.”

In a sector still plagued by abstraction, fear and a lack of trust, Faculty’s identity offers a refreshing counterpoint. It doesn’t seek to dazzle with sci-fi spectacle or confuse people with overly-technical terms. Instead, it conveys intelligence with humility and positions AI not as something cold or otherworldly, but as a tool shaped by human hands. As the technology races ahead, it’s this kind of brand – grounded, crafted, and considered – that will help society keep pace.