Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts (CSVPA), is the UK’s leading Art, Drama and Music school, associated with RADA and University of the Arts London Awarding Body. Students who have graduated from CSVPA are now working for Christian Dior, Armani, Boden, Saatchi & Saatchi, Vans, Nike, Adidas, Puma, Louis Vuitton, and Alexander McQueen.

CSVPA came to Opta Design to help them solve a tricky marketing problem: their existing prospectus was failing on several counts. Posting it around the world to prospective students was a considerable expense; its unit cost ate up a large part of their marketing budget, and it didn’t reflect and reinforce the College’s reputation as a leading Foundation School in Art & Design, Music & Drama.

So how could it be designed to work a lot harder whilst reducing it’s production costs, and yet still attract future creatives to begin their study at the relaxed, creative and multi-cultural environment the college offers?

Our starting point was an obvious one, namely to improve on the typographic design. Sloppy default H&J settings on the previous version produced paragraphs of text that looked gappy and lacked the snap to pull spreads together. So our Indesign stylesheets made the most of our choice of typeface that we chose for the project – Soho by Seb Lester – a multi-weight, multi-width slab serif design, that has enough character to reflect and reinforce the creative nature of the college, whilst at the same time be versatile enough for the demands of text, table and multi-level heading typography.

Adam Smyth was also commissioned to take new pictures of students in the impressive facilities in central Cambridge, along with new work examples from graduating students. This gave us the perfect material to integrate with our new grid and image treatment, to make for changes in contrast and rhythm necessary for engaging spreads throughout each mini-prospectus.

The final mailed product consists of six separate course prospectuses (A5) which fit into a custom blind embossed presentation folder, closing with a neat magnetic clasp. The College’s eclectic mix of courses and students is now well represented in a compact but impacting format, printed on un-coated stock by the excellent Gallpen Press. The College’s head Christopher Maughan, Head of CSVPA says of the new design: ‘It’s no longer prohibitively expensive to send to prospective students around the world, and it looks fantastic. Malcolm and Rob are an amazingly hard-working and creative partnership, that has produced a new prospectus that all departments and functions within the college are happy to call their own – a rare achievement and one they should be rightly proud of’.


‘I dream my painting and then I paint my dream’. Vincent van Gough