How I accidentally redesigned a university logo.
I am currently employed as a design manager at a private university in sunny Riverside, California and have been for the last ten years. I’ve designed everything from environmental directional signage to 50th anniversary lapel pins and even had the chance to design a float that appeared in a parade in China (not joking).
It was an early spring morning and like every other morning I filled up my cup of coffee and sat at my desk to check my project list. I skimmed through my list and noticed I received a project from my manager asking for me to provide design concepts for the new basketball floor that would be installed in the new events center.
Being a huge basketball fan (Go Lakers), I was stoked to get to work on this project. The athletics director and the university president were very particular about creating a version of our current logo (see below) that would look more “athletic and collegiate”.
I got to work and researched a variety of typefaces and how we could make these letter forms proprietary to the university. Long story short I ended up coming up with this (see below). They all loved it and we ended up sending this to the vendor to paint this on the newly installed basketball gym floor (minus the tower for this application).
Fast forward a few months and I find myself in a meeting about updating the brand style guide for our athletics department. The athletic director asks to include the all capital letter mark to the style guide. Trying to do my job and manage the brand, I tell them it’s not a good idea since it will allow people to request and want to use this mark I created strictly to be used on the gym floor.
I end up losing that battle and agree to add the mark to the style guide.
Fast forward again a few weeks and I start seeing the mark on uniforms and team shirts. I begin to worry and ask for this mark to only be used by athletics so we can keep the athletics branding separate from the overall university branding. A few weeks go by and a little bird tells me that the president loves the uppercase logo I created and wants to replace our current logo with this one.
Whoaaaaahhh pump the breaks!
I’m super confused and worried at his point. The old logo consists of the tower and the lowercase letters, but now they want me to simply replace the lowercase letters with the uppercase letters. I’m freaking out because these two elements where not built to work together but know I have to figure out a way to make this work. It seems like I’m rambling now but this is how my brain felt at the precise moment.
So the logo came to life and we did everything possible to make this work and succeed. We had to carefully document and provide all possible logo usage within our 75 page style guide.
After all was said and done, I have I can live with the logo because everything we have been through. This was definitely a challenging situation that ended up working out at the end. Though this post seems short, I did learn a long lists of lessons going through this project.
Final take always:
- Always put your best foot forward when designing. Whether you are creating a design for a multi billion dollar company or your grandmothers book club flyer you never know who will see it.
- Always keep your design responsive. Your logo might end up on the side of the Empire State Building or on the back side of a penny. Your design should always be functional and legible regardless of the size.
- Always speak your mind. I did and lost but at least I feel like I tried my best to come to an understanding with the client.
- Own your work. Would I have made a different logo if I would have known it would have become the university logo? Probably, but at the end of the day I made it and will stand by what I created.
- Be consistent. Whether I would have made a puppy dog logo or he Nike logo, be consistent when using the logo to give your brand a chance to gain some brand equity and become a memorable brand.
I can now say I have experience in designing a university logo and ready to design the next one… with a bit more planning.
