POLIMI GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Brands & Communication Design (2022)
Full design system delivered across foundations, components, and patterns through 10x two-week prototyping loops with embedded user testing
Situation
Interbrand Milan had done the hard thinking. Working closely with the school, the team had redefined its purpose, renamed it from MIP to POLIMI Graduate School of Management, and designed a new verbal and visual identity. The strategic foundation was solid and the identity was strong. But a name and a visual system, however strong, do not make an experience.
Across digital, spatial, print, and service, the school still had no coherent system to carry the new brand into the world. Internal teams in faculty, marketing, and IT worked without shared tools or governance. Students would encounter the new brand without the experience that would make it credible. The identity existed. The system that would deliver it did not.
Approach
The gap between what had been designed and what still needed to exist was significant. Closing it required a different kind of mandate.
Working with the client director, I made the case to extend the project scope beyond the original brief, securing budget for a digital product workstream that Interbrand Milan had not delivered before. That conversation was as much a design decision as a commercial one: without the digital layer, the identity would have remained a visual artefact rather than a functioning experience system.
From that point, I led the full cross-functional team across strategy, design, product, service design, and a third-party development agency, alongside the client's own teams in communications and IT. I directed the design rituals and sprint cadence, kept the client team embedded throughout, and built new delivery capabilities inside the Interbrand practice as the project ran. The work was structured around two-week prototyping loops: design, build, user test, iterate. One interdisciplinary team working in rhythm across Interbrand and POLIMI.
System
The brand experience design established how the new identity should feel at every touchpoint, translating the verbal and visual language into interaction principles, spatial logic, and editorial voice. This was not interpretation; it was the work of making brand intent legible in real environments, across screens, walls, print, and physical space.
The design system gave teams the tools to deliver consistently without reinventing decisions. A modular component library, responsive UX patterns, typographic hierarchies, and a semantic colour system built for accessibility were designed, tested, and handed over with governance that could hold after launch. Templates and assets were adopted across campaigns, events, and programme communications.
The digital product covered 20 templates across the full sitemap, each prototyped for desktop and mobile through iterative loops with developers embedded from the start. The information architecture was rebuilt around four distinct user types: prospective students, current students, alumni, and corporate partners. Navigation, content strategy, and reusable interaction patterns were designed as a coherent system, not a collection of screens.
Service design connected the frontstage experience to the backstage operations that had to support it. Training and handover sessions with faculty, marketing, and IT ensured the system was adopted, not just installed.
Outcomes
Experience Systems connected the brand experience, customer experience, and service design layers into a platform that the school could actually operate and grow. What followed was recognition, a step-change in internal adoption, and a commercial first for Interbrand Milan.
"This represents a very important development for our School, part of the great journey of change that began in 2020, when we redefined our purpose and core values and launched a new strategic plan. Working with Interbrand has been an amazing journey, a path of listening, analysis and co-creation that involved hundreds of students, alumni, prospects, and corporate and institutional #partners. I am glad I had the chance to be part of this journey, and I am extremely proud of the work we have done together as a team.”
Sergio Oliveri
Chief Communication Officer
POLIMI GSoM