ABOUT

Christ Church Oxford is one of the largest, most established and well known colleges in all of Oxford, and also, uniquely, is home to Oxford’s cathedral.

Set up in 1546 — almost 500 years ago — the college is at the cutting edge of academic research and teaching worldwide.

As part of its commitment to excellence in all that it does, the college turned to SomeOne to look at developing its visual branding.

The first step was to establish a new version of its heraldic crest.

The core of the crest consists of Sable, on a cross engrailed argent, a lion passant gules, between four leopards' faces azure, on a chief or, a rose gules barbed and seeded proper, between two Cornish choughs sable, beaked and membered gules.

Notably the iconic Cardinal’s hat, a recognised moniker of Thomas Wolsey, adorns the House’s coat of arms and sets it apart.

We worked with the college to deeply research how this symbolism has been depicted in the past and after time spent in the extensive college archives — we uncovered a hand drawn version of the arms that had never been seen publicly before.

We painstakingly re-cut this digitally, paying enormous attention to each element.

The resulting crest will now be deployed college wide across all branded elements, from online, offline, print and pixel.