A Baltimore merchant’s will and a name with an extra “s”.

The university carries the name of its benefactor, Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore businessman and Quaker who left a bequest in his will to found both a university and the affiliated Johns Hopkins Hospital, English Wikipedia says. The institution was incorporated in 1867 and opened in 1876; its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, was inaugurated on 22 February 1876.

The name itself needs care. The opening “Johns” is not a typo: Wikipedia explains that it came from the surname of the benefactor’s great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, who married Gerard Hopkins, and that the family then passed “Johns Hopkins” down as a given name. Wikipedia also records a story about the former president Milton Eisenhower being introduced at a convention as president of “John Hopkins”, and replying that he was glad to be in “Pittburgh”. The university’s brand site carries a dedicated page on the use of the name, and the student newspaper The Johns Hopkins News-Letter reported on 30 March 2017 that new branding guidelines for student groups, announced on 16 March, limited how clubs could use the Hopkins name and asked them to use approved fonts and colours with official iconography.

The early university taught in downtown Baltimore. In the early twentieth century the trustees acquired the Homewood estate in north Baltimore, formally transferred on 22 February 1902, and the flagship Gilman Hall was completed in 1915, Wikipedia says. The 1801 Homewood House, built in brick and marble in the Federal style, still stands on the campus as a museum and set the architectural tone for many later buildings, in place of the Collegiate Gothic seen at other American campuses.

A seal drawn with a London herald and a shield built from it.

The heraldic core is the academic seal. The university’s brand guidelines, as archived in December 2023, say it was adopted by the board of trustees on 7 December 1885 and that its design came from the joint work of the Baltimore historian Clayton C. Hall and Stephen Tucker, the Somerset Herald at the College of Arms in London. The Latin motto associated with the university is Veritas vos liberabit, “The truth will set you free”, Wikipedia records.

The seal is kept on a short lead. According to the same guidelines, the full-colour version is reserved for diplomas, presidential and trustee minutes, other official documents and the highest awards, while a single-colour version may be used for formal occasions and objects such as Commencement items, gifts in brass, silver or pewter, blazers rather than T-shirts, stationery and university chairs. It may never be combined with the logo and is released only with permission from University Communications. On campus the seal is also set into the floor of the Gilman Hall foyer, where, Wikipedia says, student lore holds that anyone who steps on it will not graduate, so it has been fenced off.

The everyday shield is derived from the seal. The brand site explains its three charges: an open book for knowledge and discovery, a globe for the university’s worldwide reach, and the crest of Lord Baltimore for its connection to its home community. Paired with a custom-drawn wordmark that “cannot be replicated by typing the letters”, the shield forms the logo; the wordmark may never appear without it, though the shield may be used alone as artwork. The guidelines describe ten divisional logos built on the same shield shape and say that divisions with distinct graphics before the university’s 2013 rebrand had those graphics worked into their own shields. They also note small refinements, such as a globe now drawn with three lines rather than five, and that an older “Johns Hopkins signature” has been retired from new designs.

Seals, arms, colours and wordmarks.

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.

Two blues, three typefaces and a cartoon jay.

The university publishes exact colour values. The archived guidelines specify Heritage Blue (PMS 288 C, hex #002D72) and Spirit Blue (PMS 284 C, hex #68ACE5), say one of the two blues should always be used prominently, and suggest Heritage Blue for formal work and Spirit Blue for casual work, with a secondary palette of oranges, greens, golds and browns for warmth. Wikipedia adds that the athletic colours are spirit blue and black, while sable and gold are used for academic robes. Type is equally defined: Quadon is named as the signature typeface, described as collegiate yet current, with Gentona as a companion sans for body copy and Arnhem as a serif for traditional settings, and Tahoma and Georgia as fallbacks where the licensed fonts cannot load.

The athletic mark began in the student press. The Johns Hopkins News-Letter reported on 2 April 2009 that Neil A. Grauer first drew a blue jay in 1965 for a comic strip in the student paper, suggested by its then co-editor Caleb Deschanel; the university’s guidelines date the “Historic NAG Jay” to 1966. Grauer told the paper that in 1969 the head lacrosse coach asked for a fresh set of jay cartoons, which he kept redrawing each year, and that in the mid-1990s the athletic department had a professional illustrator create the blue jay profile adopted as the official emblem. The guidelines list other athletics graphics: a Block Split H set in Quadon, the Jays hand lettering created in the late 1970s for helmets and refined in 2008 for men’s lacrosse, and a Baby Jay for youth merchandise. In November 2013 the costumed mascot was named Jay the Blue Jay after a student vote, the News-Letter editorial board reported. The guidelines add that the current costume has no teeth.

For a design guide, Johns Hopkins University shows how a seal drawn with a London herald can be reduced to a three-part shield, while a student cartoonist’s bird carries the informal side of the brand; compare Columbia University and Georgetown University for other university identities built on seals and blue. For this guide we use Heritage Blue, Spirit Blue and gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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