A sketch filed away for two centuries.

Harvard dates itself to October 28, 1636, when, the university says, it was founded by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Its name is not that of a founder. The university says John Harvard, a clergyman, did not found the school but was a major benefactor, leaving it half of his estate and a library of more than 400 books; the college took his name in recognition. The university’s own history page acknowledges the popular belief, and a statue, that suggest otherwise.

The central image of the identity is the Veritas shield — three open books on a shield, with the Latin word for truth spread across them. Its history runs in fits and starts. The Harvard Gazette reported in September 2007 that among the university’s emblems of office is a hand-drawn design in College Book I, a compilation of official records from 1639 to 1795. At a meeting dated December 27, 1643 — January 6, 1644, in the modern calendar — the Overseers approved an official seal for the college, and “Veritas” figured prominently in the design.

Then the sketch was filed away and forgotten. It lay unnoticed, the Gazette wrote, until President Josiah Quincy found it in the College Archives in 1836; the historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed that in the intervening two centuries the college had used three different seals, none of them containing Veritas. The university says the find was announced on September 8, 1836, at Harvard’s Bicentennial celebration, and that a white banner on a large tent in the Yard put the design on public display.

The sketch became the basis of the seal the Corporation adopted in 1843. The Gazette credits the Great Seal of 1885 as the source of the shield the university still uses as its familiar official emblem. An earlier version survives on the Charter of 1650, the document that, Morison wrote, still serves as the university’s constitution: an ornamented initial on the charter encloses a curious balloon-shaped version of the college arms, with a chevron, three closed books and no Veritas at all.

Six silk handkerchiefs and a vote in Holden Chapel.

Harvard’s colour began as a practical answer to a rowing problem. The Harvard Crimson told the story in April 2002. At a Boston City Regatta on June 19, 1858, a tutor named Charles W. Eliot — later the university’s president — hurried with another member of the crew to buy six Chinese silk handkerchiefs of a red hue. Quoting Morison, the paper explained that the rowers needed some distinguishing mark other than the underclothes they usually rowed in. The handkerchiefs gave the crew its colour, and the colour spread to other teams.

It did not stay put. In the early 1860s, the Crimson wrote, Boston was gripped by a fashion for magenta, and crimson cloth became hard to find; a cousin of one of the original rowers wrote in 1865 that students had to buy magenta “though abhorring it.” The baseball team went magenta in 1863, the football team followed, and in 1873 a student newspaper named itself The Harvard Magenta.

The question was settled by a meeting. Union College in Schenectady had also adopted magenta, and when the two schools met at an 1875 regatta each claimed the colour, according to Union’s archivist, quoted by the Crimson. Faculty, students and alumni gathered in Holden Chapel on May 6, 1875. After a speech by an alumnus who said he had bought magenta for the crew a decade earlier only because crimson could not be had, a large majority voted for the original colour. On May 27 the newspaper renamed itself The Harvard Crimson. Union, believing Harvard was keeping magenta, eventually changed to garnet.

The colour became official in the next century. The Crimson dates the Corporation’s decree making crimson the university’s colour to May 23, 1910. The Harvard Art Museums, citing a 1910 Corporation memorandum and the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, add the detail that makes the standard unusual: the Corporation voted that a handkerchief exhibited to the board — donated by a Miss Devens — be adopted as the standard colour of the university and preserved in its archives. The museums also say President A. Lawrence Lowell, looking for what he called an “arterial red,” worked with Lewando’s French Dye House in Watertown, which guarded its formula for decades.

Design and documentation.

University identities are usually layered rather than single marks. The earliest layer is often heraldic: a coat of arms or shield, granted or adopted at some point in an institution’s history, built from a small vocabulary of charges such as books, crowns, lions, crosses and stars, and carrying its own fixed rules about tinctures and how elements are arranged. Alongside it many institutions keep a seal, a circular device with a legend running around the edge, historically used to authenticate documents and today reserved for diplomas, formal notices and ceremonies.

A second layer is colour. Academic colours often began on the river, the sports field or in ceremonial dress, and over time a named shade became shorthand for the place itself. Because such names predate digital standards, the exact tone can vary between printed matter, kit and screens until an identity programme fixes reference values.

The newest layer is the wordmark and typography. Modern identity work tends to simplify a detailed shield for small sizes, pair it with a set name in a chosen typeface, and set rules for clear space, colour use and how departments sit beneath the main mark, so that hundreds of units can publish without drifting apart.

One shield, many versions.

The shield works less like a single logo than a family. The university says the Veritas shield is today a central element of its graphic identity, while a fuller version with wreath and banner, which it calls the adorned Veritas shield, is kept for commemorative purposes and for occasions when the university is represented as a whole. Harvard’s schools and units carry shields of their own, and the university runs a trademark programme that handles licensing and the use of its name.

That abundance has had design consequences. Harvard Magazine reported in 2013 that for a hundred years Harvard University Press appeared to have had no logo it could call its own: designers reached for one of scores of Harvard shields in the type-specimen book of the university’s Printing Office, and sometimes one shield appeared on a book’s spine and a different one on its title page. From the mid-1970s, the magazine wrote, shields became infrequent and a simple “Harvard” appeared on spines in one typeface or another.

For its centennial in 2013 the press adopted a new identity designed with the New York firm Chermayeff & Geismar. The mark is two vertical rows of three crimson rectangles, with the letter H visible in the negative space between them. Creative Bloq reported that the old shield-shaped insignia had been judged too complicated for digital use, that the redesign took about three months, that the press’s traditional crimson was kept but brightened, and that Palatino was used for the lettering. Sagi Haviv, a partner at the firm, told Harvard Magazine that the identity was meant to work on book spines and title pages and also as app and browser icons; to Creative Bloq he said the symbol looks like six books on a shelf.

For a design guide, Harvard shows how a colour and a motto can be fixed long after the institution itself — crimson by a vote and a preserved handkerchief, Veritas by a sketch found in an archive. Compare Columbia University and Oxford University. For this guide we use crimson, ink and parchment with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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