A royal charter, a revolution and a new name.

Columbia began as King’s College, founded by royal charter of George II on 31 October 1754, English Wikipedia says, with classes first held that July under its first president, Samuel Johnson. The college met on the grounds of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan before moving into College Hall, a three-storey building completed in May 1760, according to Stephen L. Wolgast’s history of the university’s academic dress in Transactions of the Burgon Society (2009).

The name changed with the politics of the age. On 1 May 1784 the New York legislature passed an act stating that the college “heretofore called King’s College” would be “forever hereafter called and known by the name of Columbia College”, Wikipedia records. A new charter in 1787 placed the college under a private board of trustees, and in 1896, when the campus moved to its present site in Morningside Heights, the institution took the name Columbia University. Its full corporate name is Columbia University in the City of New York.

The earliest piece of the visual identity is the seal, adopted by the trustees on 3 June 1755 and designed by Johnson himself, Wikipedia says. It shows a seated woman with children at her knees, an open book with a Greek inscription, a Hebrew label and the Latin motto In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen (“In thy light shall we see light”), from Psalm 36. The legend around the edge was rewritten after the revolution: from 1784 to 1787 it named the state university of New York, and afterwards Columbia College. It was not changed again in 1896, so the seal still carries the college-era wording. Its use is reserved for the trustees, who apply it to authenticate official acts.

A crown, a shield and a borrowed light blue.

The King’s Crown is a motif closely associated with the university, and it comes straight from the colonial college. Wolgast describes a crown that stood over a gate in the fence around College Hall, resembling St Edward’s Crown in shape; the university preserved the object after independence, and Wikipedia says it is now kept in the Trustees’ Room of Low Memorial Library. The crown became a campus motif in the early twentieth century: Daniel Chester French’s Alma Mater statue, installed on the Low Library steps in 1903, holds a sceptre topped with a small crown, and by 1912 the university flag showed a white crown on a blue field, Wikipedia says.

The colours came from student life rather than heraldry. Wolgast quotes a 1937 university guide stating that the light blue and white were taken from two student literary clubs, the Philolexian Society (light blue) and the Peithologian Society (white), and that the combination was adopted as early as 1852 as athletics grew. He also records that Columbia Blue was formally adopted by the trustees on 5 May 1958, specified as a commercial paint colour. When the university redesigned its academic dress in 1963 it chose slate grey gowns with light blue cording, with the president alone in light blue, Wolgast writes.

The coat of arms is comparatively recent. Wikipedia says the trustees adopted it on 10 February 1949, citing a Columbia Daily Spectator report of that date, and that it was designed by the university’s archives curator Milton Halsey Thomas, its secretary Phillip M. Hayden and the heraldry specialist Harold H. Booth. The blazon is a blue shield with a silver chevron between three gold crowns. The chevron was taken from Samuel Johnson’s personal arms and the crowns refer to King’s College; older versions add a crest of a gold lion’s head, a nod to the Columbia Lions.

Seals, arms, colours and wordmarks.

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.

A modern crown, Trajan Pro and fenced-off heritage marks.

The day-to-day identity is built around a simplified modern crown, which Wikipedia says has been the university’s official symbol since 2006, set beside the full name of the university. The university’s brand guide, as archived in November 2023, says the trademark was drawn in the official typeface Trajan Pro with set size, weight and letter spacing, and that departments should request their trademarks from the in-house studio Columbia Creative rather than typeset their own. The same guide rules that sans-serif typefaces may never be paired with the university crown.

The guide sets the usual mechanics: the height of the “o” in “Columbia” defines the clear space around the trademark, which must not be printed narrower than 1.5 inches or shown below 150 pixels on screen, and it may appear only in black, white or an approved blue, with a PMS 290 version for dark blue backgrounds. The university’s earlier identity manual was titled blue290. Schools, institutes and centres carry their own crown lockups, and Wikipedia notes a variant with diamonds in place of crosses used by the Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The heritage marks are fenced off from everyday use. The seal is reserved for the trustees, and the shield is described as a historic artefact that must not stand in for the trademark. Individual schools may hold heraldry of their own: Wikipedia says the School of General Studies adopted arms based on the university’s in 1950, adding an owl and a crowned lion’s head and the motto Lux in Tenebris Lucet, chosen because its students then attended classes at night. Athletics has its own vocabulary: the guide reserves the Columbia “C”, the curved Columbia Athletics wordmark and the Roar-ee lion graphic for the Columbia Lions.

For a design guide, Columbia University shows how a colonial-era object, a crown, can be redrawn into a modern trademark while the seal and arms stay on ceremonial duty; compare Harvard and Princeton for other Ivy League systems built on arms and a single colour. For this guide we use crown navy, light blue and white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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