KAIST Brand Guidelines: A Terman Report, a Blue Ellipse and a Purple Flag

A paper on brain drain and a special law.

KAIST began as an argument about talent leaving Korea. Its own history says that the government was trying to build technological industries after the Korean War, and that brain drain was a serious problem: many students went abroad for advanced study and few returned. Kun-Mo Chung, whom KAIST describes as a research professor at MIT and English Wikipedia as a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, wrote a paper on the problem. KAIST says USAID’s administrator, John Hannah, suggested he turn it into a proposal for a new graduate school of applied science and technology in Korea, which he did in October 1969.

The plan met resistance. KAIST says the Ministry of Education objected to the new school’s privileged status, and that the dispute was settled by putting it under the Ministry of Science and Technology. The National Assembly passed a special law in July 1970; KAIST says the arrangement included exemption from compulsory military service and financial aid for outstanding faculty and students. USAID sent a five-member team led by Frederick Terman, the former Stanford provost, and its six-chapter “Terman Report” was submitted in December 1970 to support a USAID loan. English Wikipedia adds that President Park Chung-hee backed the project.

The institute was formally founded on 16 February 1971 as the Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIS), with six departments. Korean Wikipedia places it beside the Hongneung arboretum in Seoul and says it offered only master’s and doctoral courses. KAIST’s page gives a first cohort of 40 master’s candidates; Korean Wikipedia records the first master’s entrance ceremony in March 1973, with 106 students.

The name then followed government policy. Korean Wikipedia says a law passed on 31 December 1980 led KAIS to merge with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) on 15 January 1981, forming the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. KIST separated again in June 1989, and the longer name stayed. In July 1989 the institute absorbed the undergraduate Korea Institute of Technology, founded at Daedeok in December 1984, and moved from Seoul to the Daedeok research complex in Daejeon, keeping a Seoul branch. In January 2008 the official external name became simply KAIST, and in March 2009 the Information and Communications University was merged in. Korean Wikipedia also notes that KAIST is legally a government-funded research institution with degree programmes, under the science ministry rather than the education ministry.

A wordmark, an ellipse and two dates.

KAIST publishes a 36-page KAIST UI Design Guide on its website, so its identity can be read in its own words. A history page in the guide lays out five marks: an angular black symbol for KAIS in 1971, a blue emblem for the merged institute in 1981, a KIT monogram dated 1985, and two KAIST wordmarks, dated 1995 and 2014.

The origin of the wordmark carries two dates. KAIST’s Korean-language page on its symbols says the wordmark, built on the English abbreviation, was made in 1993 under Professor Jung Kyung-won of the industrial design department. The guide dates the logo to 1995 and credits it as designed by KAIST, developed in-house, and says the name and the logotype-led approach drew attention at the time as unusually bold for a university.

The 2014 revision is credited to DESIGNPARK. The symbols page says the lettering was refined for a more modern feel, and the guide shows redrawn letters above an ellipse that now runs through a graduated blue. The ellipse also gained a new explanation. KAIST set Creativity and Challenge as its core value in 2013, the guide says, and the motif’s older associations of expansion, infinity and space were reinterpreted: two great spirits, drawn as two circles, meet in the overlap to open a new world. A diagram in the guide shows the ellipse as that overlap, with one word above and the other below.

The rest of the guide is a working system. It sets a clear space, a minimum size and a list of misuses for the logo. It names a dark blue for the logotype, with a medium blue, a blue and a light blue for the motif, plus a dark gray and white, and it shows the logo reversed on dark blue and black and set on gold and grey grounds. Signatures pair the wordmark with the Korean, English and Chinese-character names, and college and department names lock up in the same way; there is also a slogan version with “Creativity & Challenge.” A round emblem carries the founding year, 1971. The designated typeface is Noto Sans CJK, an open family under the Apache 2.0 licence, chosen, the guide says, so that forms, publicity and signs share one consistent image. KAIST’s English UI page offers downloads for the logo, emblem and signature, along with applications such as letterhead and signage.

The flag sits outside the blue system. KAIST says it shows the emblem on a purple ground, a colour chosen by Dr Lee Sang-soo, the first head of KAIS. Its explanation is scientific: purple has the highest quantum energy of the colours the eye can see, and it stands for progress, creation and pride.

How newer universities look.

Universities founded after 1950 could not borrow a medieval past, so their identities had to come from somewhere else. In Britain the buildings came first. The writer Michael Beloff chose the word “plateglass” for the new universities of the 1960s, for their modern design and wide expanses of glass in steel or concrete frames, and he wrote of the “grey or biscuit concrete massiveness” of most of their buildings and “the black towers of Essex.” The term set them apart from the Victorian redbrick universities and the ancient ones.

The marks followed a similar line, keeping the idea of a crest while simplifying it. Grafik described the Open University’s 1969 logo as a U with a crest-like structure and a punched-out O, respectful of heraldry while looking ahead. In 2022, campaign material said the same shield had become the starting point for a design system built with accessibility in mind.

Some of these universities reached the public through broadcast before most people could see a campus. The BBC dates the first Open University programme to 3 January 1971, on BBC Two, with academics as presenters and an animated logo and fanfare at the start. That late-night teaching ended in 2006. Monash University’s early fame in Australia came by a different route: Wikipedia says many people first heard of it through its student protests.

This guide follows these universities onto the surfaces where they meet the public: prospectus covers, banners on open days, degree certificates and national campaigns. For each one, it sets out what can be checked about the founding, the name and the identity, and it says who is making each claim, including when the claim comes from the university itself.

A character, a gate and a boycott.

The 2014 revision also produced a character. Nupjuki, a blue figure with a wide, flat face, was made alongside the new UI. KAIST says it released a basic form and that people online added to it, and that the character is better loved in those altered versions than in its original shape. The guide gives it colours and poses of its own. In March 2023 the Korean marketing newsletter Gogumafarm reported that a Twitter post showing Nupjuki among other university mascots had spread widely, and that traffic to KAIST’s brand shop overloaded the site.

KAIST’s symbols page treats the campus in the same spirit. The main gate is a 10.7-metre granite structure of two rectangular towers, one for science and one for technology. A carillon, paid for by graduates for the twentieth anniversary in 1991 and finished the following year, uses red, green and blue, the primary colours of light. A water tower on a hill has been called the Mazinger tower for decades, after a student joke that KAIST had hidden a robot there. Geese from the duck pond cross a road nearby, and the page says cars slow down for them.

The institute’s defence work drew an international dispute in 2018. On 20 February it opened a research centre on national defence and artificial intelligence with Hanwha Systems, Live Science reported. In April more than 50 researchers, organised by Toby Walsh of the University of New South Wales, announced a boycott, saying they would not visit KAIST, host its visitors or work on projects involving it until its president made clear the centre would not develop autonomous weapons lacking meaningful human control. The Korea Times reported that Walsh also pointed to cluster munitions, and that a Hanwha Systems spokesman denied the claim, saying those weapons were made by Hanwha Corporation. KAIST’s president, Shin Sung-chul, replied that KAIST had no intention of developing lethal autonomous weapons. The Future of Life Institute reported on 9 April that the boycott had ended, with signatories citing his commitment that KAIST would not conduct research “counter to human dignity.”

KAIST’s history page presents its own arc as one from recipient to donor, citing a Korean-funded project for an advanced science institute in Kenya, and quotes the Terman Report’s hope that the school would become a model for similar institutions elsewhere. English Wikipedia lists Georgia Tech among its dual-degree partners.

For a design guide, KAIST shows how a university can keep one simple shape for decades and change what it means. Compare HKUST, another Asian university built around science and technology, and Georgia Tech. For this guide we use blue and violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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