A charity school, an English earl and a charter signed for the king.

Dartmouth College was chartered on 13 December 1769, when its charter was signed on behalf of George III, English Wikipedia says. Wikipedia credits its establishment to Eleazar Wheelock and Samson Occom; Wheelock had earlier run Moor’s Indian Charity School in Connecticut. Money for that school came from a fundraising tour of English churches in 1766 by Occom and the Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker, and the trust set up with the proceeds was headed by William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. When the colonial governor of New Hampshire granted Wheelock a charter for a college, it was named for the earl, who, Wikipedia notes, had supported Wheelock’s earlier work but opposed the creation of the college.

Writing in the student newspaper The Dartmouth on 24 January 2018, Veselin Nanov described how Wheelock drafted the charter himself, opened the college to English youth as well as Native American students, and placed it under a board of trustees in America. Nanov also records that the college moved from Connecticut to Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1770. The motto, taken from the Book of Isaiah, is Vox clamantis in deserto, “a voice crying out in the wilderness”, and Wikipedia gives the Latin form of the name as Collegii Dartmuthensis.

The name itself was once contested. In 1816 the State of New Hampshire tried to amend the charter and turn the school into a public university; an institution called Dartmouth University occupied the college buildings and began operating in Hanover in 1817, while the college carried on teaching in rented rooms nearby. Daniel Webster, a graduate of the class of 1801, argued the college’s side before the Supreme Court of the United States, and in 1819, in the case known as Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the court found the amendment of the charter to be an illegal impairment of a contract by the state and reversed the takeover, Wikipedia records. The college regained its buildings and kept its name.

A crowded seal, a 1944 shield and a pine on a hill.

The seal came four years after the charter. Nanov reported in The Dartmouth that the college obtained an official seal on 25 August 1773, approved by the trustees, and that its design departs from the plain heraldic arrangement used by many English-speaking universities: instead of a few objects on a field, it shows a shield containing a crowded scene, with figures emerging from woodland toward a college building on a hill, personified Religion and Justice beside it, a triangle of light above and the motto shining down. During the brief life of Dartmouth University from 1817 to 1819 a different seal was designed, but no image of it survives, and the college afterwards resumed the 1773 seal.

The familiar shield is younger. According to Nanov, the trustees resolved in 1926 that the seal was for official purposes only, and in 1944 the Canadian artist Thoreau MacDonald was commissioned to draw an unofficial shield based on it. Both the seal and the shield were last updated in 1957, during preparations for the bicentennial, when the publications committee found that the founding date on them was wrong and corrected it to match the 1769 charter. The Valley News reported on 25 January 2018 that the shield had been in use since the 1940s and would remain in use.

The Lone Pine is the other emblem. The Valley News said the tree came to represent the college’s rural setting and that damage from lightning and storms forced officials to cut it down in 1895; Bartlett Tower, in College Park east of the Green, stands where it grew. The historian Jere Daniell told the paper the pine gained currency as a visual symbol around the bicentennial in 1969, and the studio Original Champions of Design says the original Lone Pine symbol was drawn for that anniversary by the Hanover designer John Scotford. Colour came earlier: English Wikipedia says students adopted a forest green, Dartmouth Green, as the official colour in 1866, and the teams are the Big Green. In 1974 the trustees declared the use of the former unofficial Indian symbol inconsistent with the college’s objectives.

Seals, colours, mascots and wordmarks.

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.

The D-Pine, Dartmouth Ruzicka and one shade of green.

The current identity launched in January 2018. The Valley News reported on 25 January 2018 that the college had rolled out a simplified logo, a green “D” with the Lone Pine inside it, which officials call the D-Pine, along with a wordmark given a standardised typeface and colour. The work was led over a year by the vice president for communications, Justin Anderson, with the New York studio Original Champions of Design. Nanov’s article in The Dartmouth noted that more than twenty different wordmarks had been in use across campus before the change, and that the college’s social-media avatars had shown Baker Tower against a blue sky.

Type sits at the centre of the system. The Dartmouth reported on 29 March 2018, in an article by Savannah Miller, that the new wordmark is set in Dartmouth Ruzicka, modelled on lettering drawn in the 1960s by Rudolph Ruzicka and used on the college’s Bicentennial Medal; the Valley News described Ruzicka as an illustrator and type designer who lived in Hanover. The revival was made by the type designer Jesse Ragan, whom the studio names as a co-founder of XYZ Type. The college’s communications office pairs Dartmouth Ruzicka with the sans serif National 2, whose licence does not allow the college to pass the font on to freelancers or vendors. Miller also reported that the collegiate-style athletics “D” would remain unaltered and that the shield was not being withdrawn.

The rules are short. The communications office says the D-Pine needs clear space of one-quarter of its height, must be at least 0.25 inch wide in print and 30 pixels on screen, and should be accompanied by Dartmouth Green unless placed on a photograph. The primary colour is Dartmouth Green, PMS 349 (hex #00693E), supported by Forest Green, PMS 627 (#12312B), a digital Rich Forest Green (#0D1E1C), Snow White and Midnight Black, with tertiary colours that the office says are inspired by the natural surroundings, and a set of recommended Benjamin Moore paint colours for painted items.

For a design guide, Dartmouth College shows how a mark can be assembled from two existing emblems, a letter and a tree, and then tied to a custom revival of local lettering; compare Cornell University and Princeton for other Ivy League identities built around a single school colour. For this guide we use Dartmouth Green and forest green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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