Responses by Giorgia Lupi, partner, Pentagram.
Background: Chiba Tech is the oldest private technology institute in Japan. As the country faces a growing shortage of technology professionals, the school has started looking outward to attract international students and global partnerships. We were tasked with designing a rebrand that highlights the school’s enduring contributions to Japan while also unifying its visual expression for an international audience. The result evokes a strong sense of pride in the school’s legacy while being systematic and clever, demonstrating Chiba Tech’s drive to be on the cutting edge of international technology education.
Design thinking: If we could create a system that demonstrates contemporary modularity while also paying tribute to Japanese culture, the brand would speak to both local and global tech-forward audiences. The Chibuggy, a mascot inspired by the school’s original 1942 logo, is the foundation of the system, consolidating the school’s legacy into a visual emblem. The expansive, principled design system that all emerges from this character reflects the innovation and ingenuity that the school instills in its students. Finding harmony in this tension of tradition and technology was what oriented our approach and the system as a whole.
Challenges: Incorporating Chiba’s heritage and the humanity of its original brand into a technologically forward visual language. This challenge really informed the design process; we spent a lot of time on Chiba’s campus talking to students and faculty as well as collaborating with community members who had been through the Japanese education system.
Favorite details: We are really proud of the systematic nature of this identity, where the core character is this visual wellspring that informs the logo, layout, custom typefaces and mascot. This variety of applications feels rigorous and precise, but there are more expressive and surprising applications too, especially for the Chibuggy. The brand is full of dualities: traditional and cutting edge, rigorous and expressive, local and international. These tensions are visible in many applications of the system, but together it feels cohesive and harmonious.
Visual influences: We were extremely inspired by Chiba’s heritage and wanted the brand to feel site specific. The traditional Japanese checker pattern, ichimatsu moyo, which represents uninterrupted prosperity and growth, was a huge influence for our adaptation of the core character. Other parts of the system, like the layout, were heavily influenced by Swiss design, so the whole thing holds the school’s new global ambitions and its legacy. The Chibuggy, while guided by the larger system in form, is inspired by tsukumogami (the mischievous spirits that appear in traditional Japanese folklore) and moe gijinka (anthropomorphism in Japanese culture.)
Specific project demands: This project was a full rebrand, not a refresh—we even truncated the name of the school from the “Chiba Institute of Technology” to “Chiba Tech.” But, because this was a full rebrand, we were asked to start from scratch, so we didn’t have as many existing materials that were specific to the school to pull from. This was challenging but also more exciting; we basically had a carte blanche to imagine all the ways the brand could look tonally and visually.
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