The George Washington University Division of External Relations today presented an update to the Board of Trustees on work underway to refresh the university’s visual identity, including modifications to the university’s logo and creative concepts that bring to life what is special and unique about the George Washington experience.
New York-based firm FutureBrand presented proposed modifications to the university’s logo and official portrait. FutureBrand's global chairman Chris Nurko, an alumnus of George Washington, has been actively involved in this project. Philadelphia-based firm 160over90 presented creative concepts that will translate into future marketing and communications. The initiative has been guided by a university-wide working group, made up of students, faculty and staff from across the university.
“The current logo suite and portrait have significant production problems, which was the impetus to examine possible alternatives,” said Lorraine Voles, vice president for external relations. “Reimaging the logo and portrait and modernizing them for better use online and across a broad array of applications will serve the entire university community for years to come.”
The current logo and portrait were introduced in 2002, before the wide use of online mediums that are ubiquitous today. The delicate font and thin lines in the logo and the fact that the portrait is a photograph of a painting rather than a digital graphic make them difficult to reproduce and to scale up and down without becoming pixilated. A bolder, more modern approach was presented to the Board of Trustees, featuring a sans serif font for the logo suite and a digital portrait created by an alumnus of George Washington who is a graphic designer on the Marketing and Creative Services team of the Division of External Relations.
At the same time that it has been exploring updates to the logo and portrait, External Relations has been working to develop a university-wide framework to establish a cohesive look and feel for the institution. Much of this creative work is based on quantitative and qualitative research with current and prospective students, faculty, staff and other stakeholders to determine the strongest and most unique attributes of the university and which messages most resonated with them. The creative concepts presented to the Board of Trustees showed how the university could translate this work into dynamic marketing communications and were inspired by interviews with GW students, faculty and staff.
External Relations will now finalize these visual elements in conjunction with the university-wide working group, with the goal of introducing the designs to the larger university community next month. A university-wide town hall will be held in early March and will provide an opportunity for students, faculty and staff from across the university to view the designs and provide feedback. The new visual identity elements will be available for use beginning this summer with the goal of having materials with the new identity elements in use at the beginning of the next academic year.