I go to Wellesley College.
Sit back for a minute and let that sink in. I’m certain that you, like most people I tell this to, have some preconceptions about the college, and by extension, about me. When I tell people I go to Wellesley, 90% of the time, the response is “Isn’t that an all-girls’ school?” My affirmative reply usually garners a smirk, an eyebrow raise, or an amused, incredulous remark about the antiquated nature of such an institution.
Most well-known colleges are associated with a particular stereotype – the awkward MIT nerd, the stuffy Harvard snob, the pretentious RISD hipster, the dumb jocks from any Division I school. Some schools embrace their stereotypes; others try to refute them. Wellesley has a number of stereotypes associated with it, none of which are very positive:
- Wellesley is where old-money families send their daughters so they can get useless degrees and marry Harvard men.
- Wellesley teaches women to be man-hating, bra-burning feminists (check the comments after any Wellesley-related news item).
- Untameable sexual frustration has turned Wellesley into a modern-day isle of Lesbos (thanks to a horribly biased and sensationalist 2001 article).
- Wellesley is full of, as frustrated Dartmouth student Jeremy Pham so charmingly put it, “entitled whores.”
- Due to its single-sex nature, old-fashioned traditions, and liberal arts bent, Wellesley is a stodgy, antiquated institution, stubbornly isolating itself from the modern world.
That final item is the least offensive, the most widespread, and likely the easiest to refute. I assume that’s why Wellesley commissioned the young, avant-garde firm Base Design (warning: their home page, aside from being jarring and incoherent, is also somewhat NSFW) to redesign the college’s visual identity. I’d say they pretty much had their work cut out for them, since Wellesley’s visual identity was none too coherent to begin with. We’ve been represented by a few different symbols, the first being the college seal:
If a college is lucky enough to have a pre-1900 seal, it has pretty much nailed the prestige factor. It’s like those companies that have held onto their original logos for decades and now their outdatedness lends them a proud air of longstanding establishment. There’s something almost religious in the seal’s Latin solemnity, its austere delicateness, its deliberately spidery, hand-done type. However, it doesn’t print well on a sweatshirt.
This logo, I believe, is solely intended to stand for Wellesley athletics. Since the college doesn’t have a mascot for its sports teams (they’re known simply as the Wellesley Blue), a logo was clearly the next best thing. As an athletics logo, it serves its purpose well – the blocky collegiate lettering and straightforward setup are instantly recognizable on sports regalia. However, there’s nothing in it that clearly states “athletics,” and various internal and external sources have mistakenly used it to represent the entire college.
This was intended to be the college’s official logo. Since it’s impossible to read the tiny type at a glance or from a distance, the logo is essentially just a W in a circle. The W’s strokes are slightly uneven, which makes me think the designer plopped it in as-is from a set of rustic-style Century or something. The medium gray and blue soften it unnecessarily and complicate printing. Rather than being unique and old-school prestigious, this W strikes me as weak and wishy-washy.
Finally, we have Base’s new logo. The W is from Garamond with a few modifications: slab-style serifs, equal-width strokes, parallel arms, and connected central serifs. The college name is unmodified Garamond. Wellesley art history professor Pat Berman gives a great video explanation of the new W in this video released by Base.
Personally, I think the modifications have taken all Garamond-ness out of the character and created a simple and recognizable W which manages to be fresh without being too trendy. Base had to strike a delicate balance between 19th-century prestige and 21st-century assertive-but-not-pushy, progressive-but-not-radical, feminist-but-not-militant power. And I think they did a fantastic job.
Brand New did an op-ed on the Base W, which is mostly favorable. However, as internet commenters are wont to do, the designers and adpeople who read Brand New quickly tore it apart, saying it was too close to the logos for Wikipedia and George W. Bush.
I’m sorry, what?
Base did a lot more identity work – specifying logo-type configurations for departments, picking out official Pantone colors, restricting print material to particular grids, and redesigning the college website. While some people might think they went a little overboard – for example, in specifying logo-type combos for all college departments – I think the college sorely needed this kind of strict guidance. Some departments used the seal, others used the logo, some used nothing, others even created their own logos. We ended up with an unruly mishmash of conflicting visual styles, none of which truly captured the overall image of the college.