New logo: University of the Arts Helsinki

The University of the Arts Helsinki (known in Finnish as Taideyliopisto) is a new arts education institution in the Finnish capital, due to begin next year when three well-respected academies are merged; the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, the Sibelius Academy and the Theatre Academy Helsinki. Its visual identity was revealed yesterday, November 27, and created by Finnish design studio Bond.

The names of the three academies that make up the new university are to be retained. They will be linked together through an X symbol and irregular three-dimensional wordmarks. My Finnish isn't great, but I've gathered that the X icon is intended to act as a starting point and a meeting place for discussions about the arts and art education.
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New logo: George Washington University

George Washington University is a private university in Washington, D.C., founded in 1821 and bearing the name of the first American president since 1904. This weekend, on August 26, it revealed a new visual identity.

The primary version of the new logo is a stacked sans serif wordmark in the university's colors. It can be used with a digital portrait of Washington, created by John McGlasson, the university's assistant director of visual design, based on a famous sculpture of the president by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

GW hired FutureBrand to oversee the identity design, while 160over90 designed new communication materials.

The previous logo was troublesome in a digital environment, and was also applied inconsistently. This exercise is aimed at uniting and tightening the university's visual identity.
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New logo: Western University

The University of Western Ontario, a public university located in London, Ontario, launched a new brand identity yesterday, January 26. Usually branded as Western University, the new logo combines a wordmark with a shield in the university's signature purple color.

The wordmark uses a custom-made typeface, named Hellmuth after the university founder. The shield comes from the university's coat of arms.

Until now, the university's logo has featured a tower that is a distinctive landmark on the campus. That logo was introduced about eleven years ago.
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New logo: Paris-Sud University

Back in July, the Paris-Sud University decided to adopt a new visual identity, with an official launch scheduled for November 1. The new identity intends to be dynamic and modern while expressing the university's "human, historical and scientific" values.

Paris-Sud University has about 30,000 students and is spread around campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris. It is a renowned science unviersity with several world class scientific laboratories.

Previous logo.

The launch the new identity seems to continue the dismantling of the odd French habit of including numbers in unversity names. The new logo features an interesting P-S lettermark. The shapes and curves from that mark are also used on templates for printed materials.
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New logo: Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University

The Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in French, abbreviated UVSQ) is a university with 18,000 students located in Versailles, about 20 kilometres from the French capital. Last week, on September 29, it launched a new visual identity, created by Dragon Rouge.

Previous logo.

The previous logo was hard to read and not really suited for web use, which had lead to the use of a separate logo for the web.

The new look introduces heraldry to the twenty-year-old university through the use of a coat of arms, with a sun representing radiating knowledge. The two colours are carried over from the previous logo, with blue symbolising knowledge and research, and green representing sustainable development, among other things.

The new logo for this young university exploits several Western university clichés. Not only does it introduce a new coat of arms, the name is written with Trajan and Gotham. Trajan is something of a default typeface for academia, and some designers would consider the use of Trajan in university logos uninspired and generic. At the same time, this solution avoids the "other" trend in modern university logos, which is to create something based on the university's initials, a common approach in France today.

There is also a compact version of the logo where the logo-type has been included in the coat of arms. The sun-ray motif is also used as a background for various publication templates.
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New logo: University of San Francisco

Last Friday, August 19, the University of San Francisco (USF) unveiled its new visual identity, along with a new tagline, "Change the World From Here".

The overhauled identity was created by San Francisco design agency Studio Hinrichs and USF's Dale Johnston, and was developed over eighteen months.

Previous logo.

The previous logo, dubbed the "cross USF logo", was allegedly introduced in 1994 and designed by Landor Associates. It contained a "budded cross" and the initials in a green rectangle.

Three-letter acronyms are generic and confusing, and most of the new logos only use the university's full name, to enforce the university's own identity and its connection to the city where it is located.

The symbol on its own.

USF is a Jesuit Catholic university, and like its predecessors, the new logo includes a cross, although it is now less on-the-nose, and has been hidden in a symbol made up of arrows. They point both inward and outward "reflecting the ongoing dialogue and engagement between the university and society".

As is costumary with university identies there are dozens of lockups of text and symbol for different uses. The logo on the top of this page is the main version, a few others are presented below.
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New logo: Northern Illinois University

Last week, on July 26, Northern Illinois University unveiled a new university logo which will be used with its tagline, "Learning Today, Leading Tomorrow", selected last year.

The creation process took place during the spring semester and started by allowing graphic artists across campus to submit their suggestions. Joe Bosack Graphic Design Co. of Pennsylvania were also involved in the design process. The submissions were then narrowed down to two before the final version was selected, with influence from polling and focus groups.

This new logo is not exactly groundbreaking when compared to other modern American university logos. As the NIU vice president for university relation Kathy Buettner told the university community portal NIU Today: "Our new logo was not just an exercise in creativity, nor was it created in a vacuum".

The building seen in the mark is the tower of Altgeld Hall, the landmark building on the NIU campus. The typeface in the wordmark is Lucida Bright Demi. As is costumary with these kinds of university identities, there are several different horizontal and vertical lock-ups of the icon and the wordmark.

Previous logo.

Previously, NIU primarily used different versions of a wordmark in the school colours.

The logo is scheduled for launch on the NIU homepage on August 15. One year later, all university units will be required to use it exclusively.
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New logo: University of Maryland, Baltimore and University of Maryland Medical Center

On May 12, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) revealed a new visual identity which unfies two institutions that previously had separate identities. UMB is a professional university, founded in 1807, while UMMC is a teaching hospital, which tracks its roots to a few decades later. Both instituions are located in Baltimore, Maryland. Although they are legally separate, they collaborate and have similar goals.

This new look replaces a cluttered image with a bunch of different independent logos that have been used by UMMC and UMB and its schools.

The new symbol is based on Davidge Hall, a building at the UMB/UMMC campus built almost 200 years ago with a dome and a portico. The portico, with a reduced number of columns, is clearly visible, while the dome can be seen in a more subtle arch.

The typefaces used are Trajan Pro for everything but the "of" part, which is Times New Roman Italic. Both are obvious and common typeface choices for university logos.

Previous UMB logo.

The previous UMB seal included elements from from the Maryland state seal and flag. They have been abandoned, but the yellow-red-black-white colour scheme is still present. Many other universities in Maryland base their logos on the state seal, so this helps distinguish UMB from them.

A previous UMMC logo (one of several, I haven't been able to track down which was the "main" version).

The UMMC logo contained a more literal representation of Davidge Hall.

The new look was launched on May 12, and will be phased in during the rest of the year, with a deadline set for January 1, 2012.
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New logo: Ural Federal University

Ural Federal University (UrFU) is a university in Yekaterinburg, the fourth most populated city in Russia. The university was formed recently by combing the two existing universities in Yekaterinburg, the Ural State Technical University (USTU) and the classical Ural State University (USU).

The visual identity for the new university was unveiled on April 7. It has been created by the Yekaterinburg agency RA Voshod (written РА Восход with cyrillic letters, meaning "Sunrise" in Russian), who won the assignment last December.

Voshod's creative director Vladislav Derevyannyh attended the unveiling of the new look and has provided a detailed explanation of the process which lead to the creation of the logo and the rest of the visual identity. Much of this article is a summary of his explanation.

The process involved going through nearly a hundred different university logos form Russia and around the world, identifying common themes and rejecting many of them for the project. So it was decided that the new logo wouldn't be a landmark, it wouldn't use illustrative images (hands, trees, globes, pens) and it wouldn't mimic a stamp. Furthermore, heraldic solutions were abandoned, as the team saw it more fitting with unversities who had a century-old tradition.

What had been present in the logos of the two preceeding universities was porticos (a number of columns with a roof structure). The USTU logo used eight columns, the USU logo used four. It's not totally clear to me, but the main problem with using the colonnade in the new identity seems have been the number of columns.

The team then looked at the name of the new university and the two that preceeded it, as well as their abbreviations and a lot of buzzwords such as "study", "mind", "unique", "universal", "success" and "aspiration", finding that the Russian letter U (У) was present in all of them. A number of different U's were tried out before settling for the final version.

Different text lock-ups.

The U symbol can be used on its own, but can also be locked-up with the abbreviation and the full name of the university, which happens to be Уральский федеральный университет имени первого Президента России Б.Н.Ельцина (which is Russian for "Ural Federal University named after Russia's first president B. N. Yeltsin").

There is no single colour for the logo, instead it uses a bunch of colourful gradients. One can also clip different images into it.

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New logo: University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

The University of Erlangen-Nuremberg is a university in Erlangen and Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany, founded in the 18th century. Its German name is Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, and its is named after the founder and one a strong supporter. Those two men can also be seen in the university's seal.

The university recently revealed a new visual identity, with a press release issued April 5. The new identity is centered on the initals FAU, until now used internally at the university. The three letters have then been divided into ten lines, à la IBM, and an interesting ligature has been created between the F and the A.

The rebrand is credited to a Munich agency called Büro für Gestaltung Wangler & Abele.

The main colour is dark blue, but there are also logos for each of the five faculties where the two lines in the middle  of the logomark have been coloured with a faculty colour. The faculties previously had their own logos that weren't related to the main university logo, so the rebrand brings some uniformity in university communcation.

The previous logo consisted of the name in full with a seal and some boxes and lines. It was reportedly introduced fifteen years ago. The seal will remain in use, for example as a watermark on stationery.

Previous logo

The main logo with faculty logos.

University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 1
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 2
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 3
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New logo: Université Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal University (Université Blaise-Pascal or Clermont-Ferrand II) is a university in Clermont-Ferrand in the middle of France. They started the year by launching a new visual identity.

The university was named after 17th century mathematician, scientist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal. A light blue version of his profile was at the center of the old logo, introduced some time during the last decade.

The new logo is centered on the university's abbreviation, UBP. The letters are simplified, and the B is formed from the whitespace between the other letters. The profile of Pascal is still present in the new logo, but has been turned into a silhouette and now acts as one of the counters in the B. The entire logo is shown at an angle, with the full name written above the initials, and the V in université turned on its side for some reason.
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New logo: Charles Sturt University

Charles Sturt University is a multi-campus university located in Australia, named after 19th century explorer Charles Sturt. They launched a new logo on Monday February 14, 2011. The new logo is a stylised version of the Swainsona formosa, or Sturt's Desert Pea, a flower available in the area. The Sturt's Desert Pea was also in the old logo, but was then part of a shield design.

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