A college on a hill above the Potomac.

Georgetown began as a college and kept its Latin name. Wikipedia dates the founding to January 23, 1789, by John Carroll, and records that the school was known as Georgetown College until 1815. It is a Catholic and Jesuit institution, and its main campus sits on a hill above the Potomac River in the Georgetown neighbourhood of Washington, D.C. The Latin name, Collegium Georgiopolitanum, survives on diplomas, which, according to Wikipedia, still speak in the genitive of the “President and Faculty of Georgetown College.”

Its authority to grant degrees came from Congress. Wikipedia records that President James Madison signed Georgetown’s congressional charter into law on March 1, 1815, allowing it to confer degrees, with the first bachelor’s degrees awarded two years later. The same entry gives the motto as Utraque Unum, “both into one,” a phrase from Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, and notes that the university publishes its own explanation of it.

The campus supplies the architecture. Healy Hall, Wikipedia says, was designed by Paul J. Pelz in a Neo-Medieval style and built between 1877 and 1879; it is a National Historic Landmark and contains Gaston Hall and Riggs Library. Behind it lies Dahlgren Quadrangle and Dahlgren Chapel, while Red Square has in recent decades become the centre of student life.

The words Hoya Saxa are painted, too. Wikipedia records that since the early 1990s the phrase has been painted in large blue and gray letters on an old trolley trestle by the Canal Road entrance, although shrubs now largely hide it, and that the sign has been an occasional target for vandals because of its link with school spirit.

A banner sewn for the boat club.

Georgetown’s colours were picked for a regatta. The university library explains that in 1876 the newly founded Georgetown College Boat Club, the original crew team, appointed a Committee on Colors: the college had no colours at the time, and supporters on shore needed a way to identify the crews during races. The committee wanted colours that would honour Georgetown students and alumni who had fought in the Civil War and express “the feeling of unity that exists between the Northern and Southern boys of the College,” and it recommended blue and gray.

The first use was a piece of needlework. According to the library, young women from the neighbouring Visitation Academy immediately sewed a banner, half blue and half gray, inscribed Ocior Euro — “swifter than the wind” — and presented it to the college. The banner, now lost, was displayed at commencements and other events, and its colours quickly became part of the tradition.

The Hoya, Georgetown’s student newspaper, revisited the story on October 15, 2021. It noted that the Boat Club’s committee was formed about ten years after the war ended, cited the library exhibition Shades of Blue and Gray: Georgetown and the Civil War as the university’s official account, and reported that some members of the community had argued for changing the colours because blue and gray refer to the Union and the Confederacy. The paper also reported that the Blue & Gray Tour Guide Society had considered a new name and had decided to keep its own. The same article recalled that the campus itself housed a Union militia in 1861, and that several of its buildings were turned over to hospital use after the Second Battle of Bull Run.

Design and documentation.

University identities are usually built from a small set of inherited parts. The earliest is often a coat of arms or seal: a shield with charges such as books, lamps, crosses, trees or animals, sometimes granted by a heraldic authority and sometimes adopted locally, and frequently redrawn over the decades as printing methods and tastes change. Around the shield sits a motto, often in Latin, which tends to survive every redesign because it is written into charters, diplomas and gates.

Next come the school colours. Many institutions name a single shade and attach it to the place, so that a colour word becomes shorthand for the whole community; style guides later pin that shade down with print and screen values. A wordmark, usually set in a serif or a custom typeface, then carries the name on letterheads, signs and websites, while the seal is kept for formal occasions.

Finally there are the athletic marks: nicknames, mascots and lettering that often grew up separately from the academic identity, through student newspapers, coaches and costume characters, and were only later folded into one licensing and brand system.

What rocks.

The name of Georgetown’s teams is a piece of classroom wordplay. Wikipedia explains that Hoya Saxa joins the Ancient Greek hoia, meaning “such” or “what,” to the Latin saxa, “rocks” — usually translated as “what rocks!” — and that it reflects a time, before 1900, when Georgetown students were required to study classical languages. The phrase was in use before 1893, when it appeared in reports of games against Swarthmore and the University of North Carolina, and by 1894 it was an established tradition, used at commencement and alumni gatherings too.

Its exact origin is not recorded. Wikipedia sets out the likely theories: that it praised the stubborn defence of the football team; that it referred to one of the baseball teams, named the Stonewalls; or that it pointed to the stone wall around the campus itself, for which that team was named. The word then moved from cheer to name. The Hoya newspaper took it in 1920, a mascot was called Hoya in 1926, and by 1929 papers such as The Washington Post were calling the teams the Hoyas — a usage that President W. Coleman Nevils encouraged. The longer form, “Hoya, Hoya, Saxa!”, appears in “The Hoya Song” of 1930 and in the fight song, “There Goes Old Georgetown.”

The mascot arrived in stages. Wikipedia records that dogs were linked to the teams informally from the late nineteenth century, including Sergeant Stubby, a decorated First World War dog who came to campus in 1921 with a law student, J. Robert Conroy, and pushed footballs across the field at halftime; a bull terrier called Jazz Bo was later renamed Hoya by students, after the cheer. The bulldog name Jack has been in use since 1962, a costumed bulldog has appeared since 1977, and the live Jack who took over in the spring 2024 semester carries the formal name Serchell’s John P. Carroll.

For a design guide, Georgetown University shows how an identity can be built from small, specific choices — a banner for a crew, a pun in two dead languages, a bulldog called Jack. Compare Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. For this guide we use blue, gray and stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Georgetown University’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.