Have you noticed a proliferation of orange, white, and black brackets around campus? They’re part of the Pentagram-designed identity system for the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes. These prestigious prizes provide unrestricted grants to support writers of fiction, non-fiction, and drama. The first-ever winners were announced in March; the prize ceremony and celebratory festival will take place from September 10–13, 2013.
Because this program is permanent, it does not have a logo (anniversaries and one-time events like Beinecke’s 50th anniversary or Yale’s Tercentennial celebration are permitted to have identifying marks). Instead, the Prizes have a recognizable visual identity created through color and a vocabulary of brackets—but no logo per se. The Prizes’ association to Yale is referenced through the use of the Yale typeface.
The brackets bring to mind the history of print and printing throughout the ages—the jumble of styles and sizes evoke the visual delight of a font drawer as well as the symbol-strewn markup of modern hypertext. In that sense, the identity is neither dated nor trendy: it is a mark of continuity throughout the still-changing world of written media.
Learn more about the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at windhamcampbell.org.