So it looks like my school is going through another major bout of rebranding. Since I enjoy being a pretend graphic designer (in between when I’m being a pretend political analyst and a real weeaboo), I took a look at what they’re trying to do.

The most interesting thing is that there was a more minor version of this happening not too long ago. It was essentially a style guide that mandated the use of two official fonts (Eidetic Neo and Solex) and outlined when to use them. It also had some stuff about faculty-specific marks. The biggest change was to the school’s logo, which changed the colour slightly and used the fonts that were being used in published materials instead.

This new rebranding effort looks a lot larger than the previous one and looks like it’ll be a significant departure from the current UW identity. The rationale behind this entire thing is that Waterloo is known for vague strengths like innovation, but not specific ones. Personally, I don’t see how rebranding will help that.

So there’s going to be a sneak peek at what the new branding is going to look like. The actual redesigned logo is not going to be used, but the elements and motifs are showed off in the banner that they put up online. Apparently, each of those is paired with an alternate design. I’ll have to wait until September or something so I can take a look at the pairs before I can say anything about those, but the black banner itself gives a few things to note.

The use of Gotham is interesting, mostly because of its use in recent history. Most people will not be able to unsee it once I point out that this is the font for the Obama campaign. In fact, the font weight used is about the same and they’re also doing the all caps thing. It’s really different from both of the fonts that they’ve been using for the past while.

The other thing is the colour use. Apparently, each faculty gets its own colour. The danger seems like it’ll be that no single one of those colours will be identified with Waterloo and that none of them will be recognized as the colour of a particular faculty like they’re supposed to be. I mean, we all know that pink is for Mathematics, but what are all the other ones? It is a mystery. The other problem is that I’m not sure that the other faculties have strong associations with a particular colour like Mathematics does. That makes the connection between colours and faculties a lot harder.

The biggest and most worrying change is probably the logo. Based on the direction that the other elements are going, there’s a good chance that the coat of arms might not survive. How would they make that fit in with all of the other funky colours they’re trying to shoehorn in?

I wouldn’t have tried to incorporate all six colours into one piece. If they were hellbent on mapping colours to faculties, I would have kept black as the primary colour, gold as secondary, and one faculty colour for tertiary. Keeping black and gold as the school colours would have been better than trying to associate six new colours, not all of which will appear together all the time, as Waterloo.

Update

Literally seconds after I hit the publish button, I find this:

Well, thanks for ruining my careful analysis, Waterloo. Anyway, if this is true, I really don’t know what to say. It is pretty much the worst thing ever.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.