A founder’s sentence and a gemstone red.

Cornell was chartered by the New York State Legislature on April 27, 1865, as the state’s land-grant institution. Its founders were two state senators: Ezra Cornell, an entrepreneur who gave his farm in Ithaca as the site, and Andrew Dickson White, a historian and educator who became its president and oversaw its early building and recruiting. The university was formally inaugurated on October 7, 1868.

Cornell’s motto is not Latin but a sentence of its founder’s: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” English Wikipedia gives the sentence as the motto for the university, citing the Cornell University Press history by Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick.

The colour is a gemstone. Cornell’s colours are carnelian and white, and English Wikipedia, citing the athletics department’s traditions page, dates them to the inauguration in 1868. Carnelian is a red-brown variety of chalcedony. The university’s brand centre now fixes the shade precisely: its published web value for carnelian is #B31B1B, with Pantone 187 for print, and it pairs the red with a dark gray, #222222, and white. Logos, the centre says, may appear only in carnelian, black or white.

The brand centre sets out a simple rule for the red. Cornell red, it says, is an immediate signal that a communication comes from the university; in a website or brochure that allows several colours, red should lead, and in media limited in colour it should stand alone. It suggests rough proportions for a layout, with primary colours carrying the bulk of a design and a secondary palette of neutral hues used sparingly as accents rather than as driving colours.

The Big Red Box and the way back to the insignia.

Cornell’s modern identity was shaped by an unpopular logo. The Cornell Daily Sun reported in November 2003 that the then-current mark — a solid red square containing the word “Cornell” — had been designed and introduced in late 2000 by a team of university graphic designers in consultation with Lippincott Mercer, according to the university’s art director, though a spokeswoman for the firm could not confirm to the paper how large a role it had played. University documents quoted by the Sun described the mark as simple but elegant, using the traditional Cornell red with great impact and building on a typeface that had been a university standard for fifteen years.

Students called it the Big Red Box. In October 2003 a Student Assembly committee chaired by Peter Cohl released a report titled “The Cornell Image: A Brand in Crisis,” which, the Sun reported, urged a return to the university’s traditional shield crest and said the box might be an adequate logo for J.C. Penney. President Jeffrey Lehman told the paper that November that he would decide the logo’s fate by the end of the academic year. He explained that the box had been introduced to bring order to a “radically decentralized” image in which different units used McGraw Tower, the university seal or graphics with their own typefaces.

The replacement came in October 2004. The Sun reported that the administration released a new logo combining the university’s insignia with a logotype spelling out “Cornell University” in full, after more than a year of preparation. Tommy Bruce, the vice president for communications who led the project, said the goal of the new visual identity programme was to reinstate the emblem of the university so that it could be used elegantly in everyday life. Simeon Moss of the Cornell News Service told the paper the mark came in several levels of detail, because the full insignia simply shrunk would look, he said, “like a swatted fly.” A month later the Sun reported Cohl’s committee welcoming the change.

Design and documentation.

A university’s visual identity is usually built in layers that arrived at different times. The earliest layer is often a seal, a circular device made to authenticate documents, typically carrying a Latin legend, a founding date and emblems such as books, a sun, a lamp or a tree. Seals were made to be pressed into wax or printed small, so their detail rewards close reading rather than quick recognition.

A second layer is the school colour. Many colleges settled on a colour in the nineteenth century for rowing crews, baseball teams and student banners, and only later wrote the shade down as a specification for print and screen. Once a colour is tied to a team, it tends to stay, because students and supporters carry it on clothing and flags.

A third layer is the mascot, an animal or figure adopted for athletics, which often gets its own set of drawings that change with each generation of designers. The newest layer is the wordmark: a name set in a chosen typeface, sometimes paired with a simplified shield, written up in an identity manual so that departments, publications and websites use one consistent signature beside the older emblems.

Palatino, Freight and a bear.

The type system is classical at the core and flexible at the edges. The brand centre names Palatino as the university’s primary serif and says it appears on the Cornell logo and embodies the university’s tradition. For web properties such as cornell.edu it uses Freight Text Pro and Freight Sans Pro, while Frutiger is offered as a sans serif for bold headline copy; for formal communications and logo lockups, Palatino and Frutiger are suggested.

On the field the university is the Big Red. English Wikipedia, citing the athletics department, says the teams had no official name until after 1905, when a recent graduate, Romeyn Berry, wrote lyrics for a new football song that included the words “the big, red team,” and the name stuck.

The bear arrived with the football team. The Cornell Daily Sun reported in May 2006 on an alumnus, John Foote, who was combing the paper’s archives to write a history of the mascot. The paper recounted that the team bought a bear cub named Touchdown for the 1915 season, that it climbed the goalposts before games and travelled with the team, and that later bears followed in 1916 and 1919 and, after a two-decade gap, in 1939. The bear has never been made official. In August 2014 the Sun reported that the Student Assembly had passed a resolution asking the university to recognise Touchdown as Cornell’s mascot, and that President David Skorton had replied on June 19 that he and other administrators considered the mascot to be simply the Big Red Bear.

For a design guide, Cornell is a case study in a logo reversed by its own community: a minimal red box introduced for consistency, criticised by students within three years, and replaced by the university’s insignia and its full name. Compare Columbia University and Brown University. For this guide we pair the published carnelian and dark gray with our own neutrals and a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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