Adding some interest to the UW Logo
7 April 2008 in UncategorizedI’ve worked at the University of Waterloo for over four years now. Finally, as of April 1st, 2008 I am a permanent staff employee with full benefits. My new title is Information Systems Developer and I am responsible for the design and development of web projects for the department of Housing and Residences. Essentially I’ve been doing this already for a couple years and have quite a few project credits to my name already; including some that have been sold to other departments on campus. I aim to continue designing web applications that challenge users perceptions of the web and that are fundamentally user friendly to work with.
I’ve long been bored by UW’s brand image. Our web Common Look and Feel (CLF), while minimalist and consistent, is very boring. It is the result of a designers struggle against the input of a committee. The CLF allows some flexibility in terms of navigation and colour but is essentially a mostly white, box layout. Over the course of this year I plan to tweak elements of the UW brand while working on a new sub brand for a large project. Mostly these tweaks will be experiments with what is possible, some will be ridiculous, others ugly and a majority just plain amateurish — I am no artist. I hope however to get people thinking about how to break out of the box and build a strong UW brand on the web without just making everything the same.
For my first experiment I decided to take on the UW crest — check any link above for the original. The CLF features it very prominently on every page in the top left corner. It is both a brand mark and a quick link back to the root UW homepage. Recently the logo had a makeover, the almost primary yellow was swapped for a more eye friendly version and the red was deepened. This both prints better on physical paper and doesn’t grab hold of the eye immediately on page load. However the crest is still just a flat colour boring image so I figured why not attempt to give it some life and depth. I wanted to make it look as if it was an artists representation of a fictitious real version that could actually exist somewhere on campus behind glass.
I wonder how much that solid gold shield weights?
Sexy!
While you’ve been off doing graphic design, I’ve been working away at some PHP code. I made a contact form which reads in e-mails from a MySQL database and sends an e-mail to a list based on their section in a choir. I’m very proud of it. :-)
I think some HTML entities are a little wonky in your code. It looks like you may have put a dollar sign instead of an ampersand in there. :-P
I’m sorry, I had to laugh a bit when I saw that. Imagining the reactions of certain people if that was actually proposed! Ha.
Really, some people are so conservative. A lot of what we do comes out of not wanting to offend anyone. Safe, boring. Remember the black home page from earlier this year? Too controversial, it had to go. I think the new logo update was a bit of an improvement but at the same time very wishy washy. I’ve been familiar with UW for most of my life (my parents went there) and always associated it with black. Strong. I hope they go back in that direction with the new branding update.
This is a bit of a tricky issue – trying to get people to push the limits. It’s concerning because most of the time when people try to do something different they do it badly. If Matt R. is involved it works well, but otherwise there hasn’t been the investment in graphic/web design skill at UW.
So, if that’s the case I think it’s important tohave some good solid standards. However, I agree that the current CLF is just too bland. I know some people are going to resist changing it but in my mind there’s nothing to hang on to. It’s a non-design.
I’m interested in seeing what you’re working on ;)