because the people who select them are so boring ;)

You have to understand the selection process of both the person to do the designing and the big committee to approve it.

As Paula Scher once said. “Fifty percent of doing good work is actually having it made.”

ChrisL

AllGiggles, since you seem to be writing from the UK, you may not be aware of the unique aesthetic that has developed amongst American college athletic logos. A perusal of the myriad designs at this site will show you some of the trends that have developed — bold, oblique, and high-contrast type (often with pointed serifs), everything on an angle, every mascot sneering, etc. There are some historical marks presented at the site (Alabama’s all-smiles elephant from who-knows-when comes to mind) to give you a historical perspective, too.

As for official logos for colleges and universities, there does seem to be way too many marks that include a torch (signifying knowledge), complicated seals (asserting legitimacy by harking back to European institutions), or (almost exclusively) serif type.

Some institutions have worked hard to update their identities, often giving a modern facelift to their crests and seals (Loyola Chicago and Cornell come to mind).

My institution, the University of Notre Dame, has done the same, recently updating their identity to include this simplified mark. However, it should be noted that the university seal — a more complicated, historical version of what’s seen in the new mark — is still used for official business and can be found many places on campus.

Everytime I look at the type logo for my university, I frown at the lack of optical justification on ’UNIVERSITY’ The right arm of the _Y_ is flush with the downstroke of the el in Drexel and therefore makes it feel like UNIVERSITY isn’t wide enough on the right side.

They are boring because they are designed by committee. :)

They’re not all boring, I quite like the Direct Gov example you cited, but I agree that Wigan college etc. ain’t great.

My own beef with uni logos is the University of Nottingham - they had a great logo (I think The Chase designed it), and they’ve semi-introduced a watered-down version that takes a portion of the old logo and then replaces the beautiful typography with a couple of lines of Dax. The clincher is that they had a new building made in the last few years, and the signage on the entrance still bears the previous logo. So, their marketing department have created a de-personalised, bland, modern-looking logotype to represent a red-brick university steeped in heritage. Nice one. (There are 2 unis in Nottingham, the other is an old poly which has, incidentally, rebranded to appear more established).

It comes down to design by committee, and letting everyone in the place have their say on it... I can see why it happens, but you would think that a marketing department should really know better.

http://www.eciad.ca/www/
take a look at this college
is it boring too?