A will, a legal fight and a royal charter.

McGill University carries the name of James McGill, a Glasgow-born merchant in Quebec whose business included the fur trade. English Wikipedia says that between 1811 and 1813 he drew up a will leaving his Burnside estate and funds for the creation of a “University or College, for the purposes of Education and the Advancement of Learning” in the province. The will set a condition: a college bearing his name had to be established within ten years, or the bequest would pass to the heirs of his wife.

The condition was met only just. Wikipedia says that after protracted legal battles with the Desrivières family, the heirs of his wife, McGill College received a royal charter from George IV on 31 March 1821, with the power to confer degrees. The college then sat largely inactive until 1829, when the Montreal Medical Institution became its academic unit. Wikipedia says that institution had been founded in 1823; later milestones it records include separate lectures for women, funded by Donald Smith, from 1884, and degrees conferred on women from 1888. The bequest itself was administered by the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, a body created by an act of the Lower Canada legislature in 1801, Wikipedia says.

The name changed in stages. The institution began as the University of McGill College, and Wikipedia says the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885. The founder’s name has been the core of the brand from the start, in English and in French, where the university is Université McGill.

That personal origin runs straight into the heraldry. The arms, Wikipedia says, are derived from an armorial device that James McGill himself assumed during his lifetime. So when the university came to formalise its arms in the twentieth century, it reached back to the founder’s own emblem rather than inventing a new one.

Three martlets, a book and two crowns.

The arms were designed in 1906 by Percy Nobbs, then three years into his post as director of the university’s School of Architecture, according to English Wikipedia. The design was later made official in a sequence of registrations: Wikipedia says a patent of arms was granted by the Garter King of Arms in 1922, the arms were registered with the Lord Lyon King of Arms in Edinburgh in 1956, and they were entered in the Public Register of Arms, Flags and Badges of Canada in 1992 — three heraldic authorities across seven decades, reflecting the founder’s Scottish birth and the university’s Canadian home.

In plain terms the blazon describes a silver shield with three red martlets. Across the top runs a red band with a zigzag (“dancetty”) lower edge, carrying an open book inscribed In Domino Confido — “I trust in the Lord” — between two crowns. The martlet is a heraldic bird usually drawn without feet, and Wikipedia says it has become the university’s symbol in its own right, appearing far beyond the shield.

The motto sits on a scroll beneath: Grandescunt aucta labore. Wikipedia gives the sense as “by work, all things increase and grow”, or more literally, things that grow to be great do so by means of work. Wikipedia adds that the full arms are made of two parts, the shield and the scroll, and that the university publishes a guide to the use of its arms and motto, so the pairing of shield and Latin line is a governed element rather than an optional flourish.

The martlet also gives its name to athletics. Women’s teams compete as the Martlets. The men’s teams carried a different name for decades: on 12 April 2019, the Toronto Star reported, the university announced it was dropping the Redmen name for men’s varsity teams, effective immediately. The men’s teams now compete as the Redbirds, Wikipedia says, so both sides of the athletics programme now take their names from birds, echoing the martlets on the shield.

Arms, mottos, colours and wordmarks.

A university’s identity usually begins with a coat of arms, a shield granted or adopted to mark the institution in the way a family or a town would be marked. The charges on that shield often carry meaning: books stand for learning, crowns for a royal charter or patron, and heraldic animals and birds borrowed from a founder’s own arms or from the landscape of the region. Beneath the shield sits a motto, very often in Latin, compressing an institutional purpose into a handful of words that survive every later redesign.

Alongside the arms, universities often settle on one or two institutional colours. These begin in academic dress, rowing jackets and sports kit, and only later become specified tones in a style manual, with print and screen values set out for staff and suppliers.

The modern layer is the wordmark: a typeset name paired with a simplified shield, built to work at small sizes on websites, apps and signage. Many institutions now keep the full arms for ceremonial use, such as degree certificates and convocation, while the simplified mark carries day-to-day communications. Athletics programmes frequently run a separate family of marks with their own team names and mascots.

Scarlet, martlets and a governed shield.

The colour is scarlet. Wikipedia describes it as the university’s official colour and notes that it figures prominently in McGill’s academic dress. The same red appears in the shield itself, in the martlets and the band across the top, so the colour and the arms reinforce one another: a red-and-white institution with red birds on a white field.

The athletic names reinforce it again. The Toronto Star reported that the 2019 change was announced by principal Suzanne Fortier. The current names, Redbirds and Martlets, both draw on birds, the same family of image as the martlets in the arms.

For a design reader, McGill is a clean case of an identity anchored in a founder. The name is a person’s; the arms derive from that person’s own device; the colour comes from the gown. The registrations in London, Edinburgh and Ottawa tie the shield to three heraldic traditions, and the motto spells out a working ethic in four Latin words. The martlet, a single small bird, appears both on the shield and in the name of the women’s teams.

For a design guide, McGill University shows how a founder’s emblem can become an institution’s arms, how one heraldic bird can carry a whole athletics programme, and how a single scarlet can link gown, shield and team. Compare it with the University of Toronto, chartered in the same decade, with the Montréal Canadiens, another red Montreal identity, or with the University of Edinburgh. For this guide we use scarlet, a pale rose and white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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