99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-69- The Brief and Tumultuous Life of the New UC Logo

Episode Date: January 1, 2013

If you’re not from California, or missed this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo. Or rather had a new logo. To be more precise they had a new “visual identity system,” which is the kind … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Metaphorical anecdote coming in 3, 2, 1. Years ago we were asked to do a re-asign for a school. A school that will remain anonymous. It was for their sports program. They needed a new mascot. That's Christopher Simmons. My name is Christopher Simmons. I am the principal and creative director of the design firm mine in San Francisco. He also teaches identity design at the California College of the Arts. We've created several alternatives. A few new mascots.

To show that to the steering committee, they had their favorite, but they were unsure. They wanted buy-in from the student body and alums. Seem reasonable, but also treacherous territory. So they got like 600 something responses and overwhelmingly, by right and vote, the original logo was the favorite. Not surprising. Change is often the hardest of all possible options. And people would argue, well, you know, that's everyone feels maybe we shouldn't change it. But there was a real problem with the old mascot.

The problem was, they were using their original logo illegally. It was actually the University of Notre Dame's logo and the reason they engaged us to change it was because they realized they did not have the right to do that. Of course the constituency of the school, all the people who loved the original logo didn't know anything about that. They didn't know the reason why they're needed to be a new logo. But the public dialogue continued. Then of course people wanted to be constructive with their criticism. So they said, well, the reasons we don't like the new one, if we had to pick up a new one, why is it a white person, right? We're a diverse school so it should be maybe more ethnically ambiguous. Why is it a male?

We're co-ed, so maybe it could be more androgynous. He's so aggressive. I know it's a sports program, but you know, we're a Catholic school. Could you make it less violent? And so they wanted a ethnically ambiguous androgynous non-violent mascot, and they're the fighting Irish. There are factors at play that guide a design of which not everyone is aware.

But that doesn't stop everyone from having an opinion. And I like people having opinions about design. I think a design awareness is at an all-time high, and this has by and large help designers of all kinds. People have cotton dawned on to the idea that their interaction with the built world and their hidden communication with the people who designed it really matters. It's really important. And like I said, this usually works out pretty well, but sometimes it's a f***ing train wreck.

This is the biography of a logo, the brief and tumultuous life of the new logo of the University of California. So if you're not from California or miss this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo, kinda, or rather, had a new logo. And to be more precise, they had a new visual identity system, which is the kind of entirely accurate but completely wonky description that gets met with sarcastic eye rolls from anyone who isn't a designer, but there it is. But they don't have a new logo anymore, because of a massive public backlash. The UC system actually suspended the new monogram logo, while we were reporting this story.

And the creative director of the UC office of the president is not happy about how it turned out. I would say that it was the use of the rhetoric of democracy for the tyranny of the minority. That's Vanessa Corea. We'll hear more from her in a minute. And the fellow you heard before her, it's the ruse far of our. He's been on the show before,

having reported about Bond, Germany, and amazing Belgian beer. But now he's back home here in the Golden State of California. Alright, so before we get to why people hated this new logo, we need to tell you what it looked like first. It looks a little like a shield with a mostly flat top and a rounded bottom. Supermphosed on the shield is the letter C. And when it was first presented, the shield was in blue and the C was in gold. These are the historic colors of the university system. But it was designed to be extremely versatile and almost any color. So just to be clear, this was the new symbol for the entire UC system as a whole. Not just UC Berkeley or UCLA or UC San Diego, all ten campuses. So one of the reasons the public backlash surprised the in-house team that designed this logo,

and it's a company and color scheme and associated icons, is that it's all been around for nearly a year. It was part of a massive on-word California public marketing campaign to build awareness of the university system as part of what makes California great. Yeah, in fact, they took it on tour to all 10 campuses, where they drove around a build awareness of the university system as part of what makes California great. Yeah, in fact, they took it on tour to all 10 campuses, where they drove around a huge truck with the logo and all the new colors and everything around to show it to the faculty and students, and no one said a word.

The design team at the UC office of the president probably thought they'd done a good job and they were ready to move forward. Then in early December, these shields like UC Monogram hit the blocks. And two things happened that set the stage for the burning towards reaction that it got from the public beyond the aesthetic opinions. I do recognize that there are completely valid criticisms that could be made about the design itself, but this first error on the part of the press really doomed it out of the gate. There were lots of articles in the media, nearly all of them actually,

that put the classic university seal side by side with the new UC logo. It sort of strongly implied, I think, to most people, and reasonably so, that the seal was the before and the monogram was after. That's Christopher Simmons again, who you heard from at the very top of the show. He had nothing to do with this UC logo redesigned but he waited into the fray with a blog post on his own website called Why the UC Rebrand is Better Than You Think.

And that therefore the monogram would be replacing the seal. And of course that wasn't the case. It sort of framed the conversation completely wrong. The second misstep, and this one actually got to me as a UC Berkeley graduate, was that the UC Office of the President released a video online that showed the graphical evolution from the old seal to the new logo. Which was produced by the University of California to kind of show some of the thinking behind the genesis of the new monogram, and how it related to the seal, how it sort of took some

of its cues from it. In the video, hands-pulled design elements from the seal to create the new design and literally sweep aside the old seal, brushing it away and tossing it out. The video reinforced everyone's greatest fear about the new brand. So those two things were working against it from the get-go.

And the fact that this was all new and changes understandably very hard and as a university logo it was really standing out all on its own. It's really easy to criticize. The UC alumni and the California public at large sought and the reaction was really negative. Roman, that is actually an understatement. A lot of people felt that this new logo was too modern, too cheap, and really denigrated the gravitas, and that was the word that was used,

the gravitas of the university. In fact, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, sent an angry letter on December 11th to the UC president. Quote, the overwhelmingly negative response to the recent change to the UC president, quote, the overwhelmingly negative response to the recent change to the University of California logo demands immediate attention.

He went on, perhaps now it is time to return to the use of the old logo and allowed the university community a cooling off period to concentrate on the long term health of the university. Instead of being creative with the University of California logo, which would be searching for creative solutions for funding the University of California. He's wrong because the logo, there is no logo to restore. There was no old logo, and again, it's a classic case of the misinformation reaching the very, very top.

That's Vanessa Kareya, the creative director of the UC Office of the President. Vanessa led the team that came up with this logo in the new visual brand. She says that a lot of the negative reaction was because the media implied that the classic seal was being replaced. But there were no such plans. The seal which the UC has reassured everyone will stay on diplomas is more of a classic collegiate icon. It's circular with the words seal of the University of California around the edge, an image of an open book and the motto let there be light at the bottom. An earlier version of the seal dates back to when the university was founded in the 19th century. In its current form, that seal has been unchanged since 1910.

So UC Berkeley, my alma mater, has the UC seal on its official communications. It's what's on my diploma. It was on my aunts, my grandparents, and yes, in its earlier form, it was on my great-grandparents' diplomas. I am the fourth generation in a line of UC Berkeley graduates. But more casual logos do exist, like the CalScript logo that's on the UC Berkeley football helmet. And every 10th person sweatshirt and downtown Berkeley. Or the C. BearClaw logo that's on a baseball cap that I own. So Cal and UCLA and lots of other universities

have this distinctiveness between a more official seal and a more casual logo, but the UC system as a whole did not. The seal for all the good things that it does represent can't carry all of that symbolic weight. Why not? Because it's already interacting in a sort of rhetorical space that is much more institutional. Like it's too stuffy. You can say that if you want, but... Is that sort of how you feel about it? feel about it? I actually think that the seal is fantastic because when we need to have the weight,

the full weight, and gravitas of the university behind a budget book, or behind a proclamation by the president, or whatever that is, that seal gives us that gravitas. But we don't always want that gravitas. That gravitas has a place in communication. It's like having a tuxedo and being forced to wear it every single day. In other words, what the team of designers at UC intended to do was to create an icon

that could be used as part of a broader campaign to more dynamically and more casually explain the university system to people. Korea explained that the logo would never stand on its own as it was depicted in media reports. It would almost always be presented with the words University of California next to it, or the motto, let there be light. It would have all these other visual cues that would help you see, sell itself. You talked about expressing dynamism and light and these sorts of things. Do you feel like that the logo should be able to stand on its own? I mean, I think that, again, for me, I feel like when I look at this and you say,

well, you know, it's part of a larger thing. There's text that goes with it. There's other contextual information that would help me to understand what it is. Because when I just see it, this does not scream to me, you see. Like, I don't- What's that? Today it doesn't, but it will. Okay. So, you know, you need the ecosystem to build the meaning into the object.

You need people to begin to identify it with the good works of the university for them to... You build the meaning. A logo on itself is nothing. It's just a...it's a thing. You know, you...a logo doesn't come fully formed with the meaning baked in. The meaning is accrued over time. The Nike swoosh looks like a giant chat mark. I mean, if people had social media insight into it today, they would say, why is it only one? Why is it so plain? Why is it look like a check? You know, is that supposed to be a wing?

I don't get it. I don't see a wing. You know, the meaning has accrued through years of quality products or non-quality products and athletes associating with it and the interaction that you have with the brand writ large. The same thing for Apple. Can you imagine?

I mean, it's an Apple. This is a computer company. Why do you have an Apple? Is this a grocery store? I don't understand. It's the same kind of thing. The meaning is not baked in. You build the meaning.

That's what building a brand is. People's emotional resonance with something develops over time. The only reason why it's a ruse and so many other UC alums have such a strong bond with the seal is because it's been around for over a century. And that bond is further strengthened by every other seal in the world. They're really not all that distinct.

Seals now kind of naturally communicate a history and tradition, and indeed, gravitas. Vanessa says she gets all that. And while she herself may have attended another UC, that would be the University of Cincinnati, she thinks that part of why there's been so much negative attention toward the logo is because it's become a lightning rod for other issues.

I think that there are other things going on here in the outcry. Part of what's going on is that this has become a very simple way to express a lot of other frustrations about the university. I mean, I've received that from a lot of different people. They are frustrated because they feel like the administration is inaccessible. They're frustrated because their tuition's going up. They're frustrated for all these things. They're frustrated about the privatization of the university.

Rightly so. I'm frustrated too. That's part of the reason why I'm sitting here trying to get people to actually care about it because I want them to go and vote for it. But now that we've described the purpose of the logo and the uphill climb it had ahead of it, I think it's fair to talk about the actual graphic design that a lot of people, both the lay public and several designers, had huge problems with. One common complaint was the fact that the C part of the design wasn't totally solid. It was a gradient. The bottom part of

the C was lighter than the top. And while the intention was to convey movement and luminosity, that's not what a lot of people saw in it. The first time I saw the logo, I immediately thought of a computer icon of something loading. I spent a lot of time in front of my computer. Maybe you do too. This C looks exactly like a circle,

indicating a loading browser tab or Skype opening or any other number of loading scenarios on a computer. Vanessa told me that this was pure coincidence and she expressed a little bit of regret over it. This particular color combination is one that really pops out that loader bar reference in a way that is again, I mean, very unfortunate. On the UC website where the identity was introduced, you could actually see other versions of the logo with different colors.

They were black and white and blue and white versions of the monogram that didn't have a gradient at all. I personally preferred those, but I don't think those were very widely seen. Vanessa also told me that what's gotten drowned out in all the noise of journalists like me wanting to talk to her is the fact that people in the design world do like it. There was an op-ed written in the San Francisco Chronicle by Rob Duncan, formerly of Pentagram. He's now an art director at Apple, and he also runs his own design shop in San Francisco. He called the new UC logo, quote, one of the freshest and most creative education identity schemes in a country full of boring institutional logos. But the much more common and widely publicized response was very, very negative. An online petition called Stop the New UC logo received over 54,000 signatures, and

as we alluded to earlier, on December 14, there's a few days into the extremely vociferous public reaction to the logo. The UC director of marketing communications released a statement saying that the new UC monogram was being shelved. Quote, in the past week, it has become clear that the University of California's system-wide monogram recently created is a source for great debate, dialogue, and division. In short, it's too much of a distraction from our broader effort to communicate UC's value and vital contributions to Californians. So we intend to suspend use of the new monograms. We will begin to take steps required to do so. I certainly had an initial negative reaction to the monogram when I first saw it too.

I still think the gradient is just not quite right, but overall, after talking to Vanessa, even a skeptic like me is a little bit more convinced of its usefulness and of its quality. You don't have to like design to recognize that it's good design. I don't like Led Zeppelin. Don't say anything about it. I don't like Led Zeppelin.

I have no opinion on Led Zeppelin one way or another. I don't like Led Zeppelin, but I understand what they've done and why people think they're good and why they are good and where they fit into rock and roll history. Like, it's fine not to like it, but you need to understand what it's trying to do, and to go from there, you know, I would say, I hate the IBM logo, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

It does what it needs to do. And so from that perspective, I would say, you know, I would hope that people think about design, and the way that one should be thinking about design, rather than assuming that purely subjective response to one thing badly posted on a internet platform is is enough to base an entire judgment on. I talked to my 91-year-old grandfather about the new UC logo 2. He graduated from Calvin in the 1940s and he said he didn't like it either. For many of the same reasons that we talked about earlier, that it wasn't clear what it was supposed to represent, that

the sea in UC looked weird. And when I explained what Vanessa had told me, he chewed on that for a while, but ultimately I think came away unconvinced. For Korea and many designers who have spoken out in support of her and her team's efforts, they continue to say that their work was bold, daring, and does represent modern California. Here again is Christopher Simmons. I think the role of an expert, and an expert to me is just someone who is trained in a particular field and has some, perhaps, or hopefully, deep experience in the practice of that field, is to see the world through a different lens. So, for example, when we had our kitchen renovated here, I don't know anything about architecture,

I don't know anything about engineering, I don't know anything about really about interior design. I have my opinions, but that's all they are. And so, when a designer tells me why I think this would work best, I defer to that opinion. When a mechanic tells me that this thing needs to be fixed on my car, I trust that he or she is active with that. When I go to my doctor, they're telling me how to understand my own body, and I don't know how to interpret what's happening to my body, so I allow them to do that for me.

When it comes to design, we don't seem culturally to have that same trust. And so, perhaps saying that people are ignorant of design or not knowledgeable of the process or short-sighted is contentious, it's probably strictly speaking true, but it's not always wise to say the true thing in exactly the way you're thinking it. We live in a time when everyone feels that their opinion matters. And the reality is, is that not all opinions are equal. That's not popular because you like to think that your voice is the same as someone else's. But when it comes to, for example, physics, my voice is not the same as Stephen Hawkins.

Nor should it be. Aesthetics is a very easy target because everyone, no one understands how aesthetics works, and they feel that subjective opinion is the rule of the day. I don't like it, therefore it must not be good. So, I get that. No one wants to be told how to do their job by rank amateurs who don't understand what they're trying to do. I don't go to restaurants and tell chefs that their pizza could use more basil in the tomato sauce, but the difference between designers like Vanessa and the physics world

is that we, the public, are not invited to sit in Stephen Hawking's physics lab in Cambridge. We're not part of that world, period. But design in general, and this design in particular, is about communication and interaction with a public who are completely unaware of the motivations behind a certain design. The logo isn't meant to sit in someone's sketchbook. It's meant to be out there in the world, telling the story of the University of California. And right or wrong, the people connected to the university still feel like they have a say in the matter. It's hard to say what the ultimate effect of this whole fiasco will be. I think institutions like the University of California, which tend to be pretty change-averse anyway, will be more gondoshai about pushing new designs and new ideas forward.

There will be a chilling effect. If that comes to pass, that will be a real shame. I hope the people who really dislike the logo, at least the thoughtful ones, would also not want to see that happen. But I also don't want designers to circle the wagons and claim that no design can be criticized unless the person with an opinion knows the full backstory of the design process. That just seems false and incongruous with reality. I didn't see people making the same defense of the new Gap logo with the little blue square

that appeared briefly in 2010. It was derided by everyone, everywhere. Even Christopher Simmons, who has very thoughtfully considered and spoken out against the overreaction to the UC logo, took some swings at the Gap logo back then. Someone made some, you know, jerky website where you could turn anything into the Gap logo to kind of emphasize how generic it was. And so, for a while, my Facebook profile image

was, you know, my name with the little blue square in the top right corner. And, you know, in retrospect, that was probably mean. And, you know, I think I take it back. I would. I think it speaks well of his character that Christopher regrets that, but I don't know if he should.

He cared, any comments, it fundamentally, because these things matter to him. On one level is great that the public is engaged and passionate about design. It's a little dispearing that every time it happens, it's to recall the UC logo, to recall the gap logo, to recall the tropical canapackaging. And we don't see the opposite. We don't see people galvanized around a great new identity that they love.

It's very easy to pile on the hate and the criticism and not offer meaningful alternatives. That said, the fact that design is even being discussed signals that it's important, that it's important to people, that it's important to culture, that it's important to business, and that's a win for everyone. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sirouse Farvara with help from Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. It's a project of 91.7, local public radio KALW in San Francisco, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco.

Christopher Simmons, the principal of mine who was featured in this episode, was also interviewed by my hero Debbie Mellman on a recent episode of her Design Matters podcast. I was also featured last season if you want to check that out. You can find Design Matters in iTunes or at Design Observer. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, but right now you can look at the UC logo and all kinds of links to all the controversy at 99%invisible.org. from PRX.