Y Design Blog
This week, the Athletics Department will unveil the logo for its centennial celebration of the Yale Bowl. When Athletics brought this project to our office, they requested that the logo capture the essence of the stadium in a nostalgic, but not old-fashioned, way.
Rebecca and I couldn’t help but laugh at the wonderful image she is using in a new invitation design for the Lewis Walpole Library, which made me realize that in LWL’s communications, she uses recurring image treatment to build an individual look for the library.
Our office occasionally takes on projects to brand major Yale events—like the 50th anniversary of Beinecke Library and President Salovey’s inauguration last fall. Yale’s identity guidelines encourage the development of distinctive logos for such singular and finite events. On the other hand, Yale’s many organizations are asked not to create custom logos in the course of their regular activities. The “no custom logos” constraint can be disconcerting to some, but I would argue that this concern is based on a common misunderstanding about how visual identity is created. A logo (alone) does not a visual identity make.
Hi everyone! Forgive our long absence—we’ve been very busy. I plan to share some of the office’s projects in the next few posts.
Recently, the Beinecke Library expressed a need for greater formatting flexibility in its e-newsletters in order to publish an increasingly wide range of content.
Winners of the 2014 Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes have been announced.
This year’s senior prize was awarded to Austin Jung of Saybrook College for his collection on the Esperanto language. Solene Goycochea of Morse College was awarded a senior second prize for her Basque history collection. Sarah Maslin of Trumbull College received a senior honorable mention for her collection titled “Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Violence in Latin America.”
Rebecca Martz designed the Winter–Spring 2014 events broadside for Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library—now in the mail. This is the third calendar she has produced for the library—the first two announced programming that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013.
Today is Rollins Fellow and Graphic Designer, Chika Ota’s, last day working at the Office of the Yale University Printer! John wrote and delivered a lovely farewell to Chika during our open house:
You have transformed our office with your hard work, talent, and entrepreneurial energy. Your ability to win the confidence of our clients and colleagues by interpreting their needs in keeping with Yale’s institutional goals has added much to our office’s reputation. It’s not exaggerating to say that you have raised the University’s perception of design’s power to serve its communication goals.
We worked with Bass to design table tents intended to enliven study spaces and show support for students during reading week and finals.
We felt that our design should in some way speak specifically to studying in Yale libraries. So, we paired text with archival images of Yale students hard at work in the libraries back in the day.
Today I stopped by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery to check out two very different exhibition designs.
At the YCBA, the pieces in Sculpture by Nicola Hicks are installed among paintings selected by the artist from the museum’s permanent collection.