The Open University Brand Guidelines: The O-in-U Shield and a BBC Fanfare

Planned from 1965, chartered in 1969.

The Open University began as a political project. English Wikipedia credits its foundation to the Labour government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, using the vision of Michael Young, with planning from 1965 under the minister Jennie Lee. She set up a committee of vice-chancellors, educationalists and television broadcasters. Wikipedia records opposition from officials, the Treasury, ministerial colleagues and commercial broadcasters, and says the project came through on Lee’s tenacity, Wilson’s support and early costings that looked modest.

The Privy Council granted the royal charter on 23 April 1969. Wikipedia says the university was first based at Alexandra Palace in north London, using television studios and editing facilities vacated by the BBC. Its administration now sits at Walton Hall in Milton Keynes, on a campus of about 45 hectares, where a manor house holds the vice-chancellor’s office.

That campus is a workplace more than a student town. Undergraduates principally study off campus; those based there are mainly staff and full-time research students. The first students enrolled in January 1971, and the educator Tony Bates, reviewing Daniel Weinbren’s history of the university in 2015, put the opening figure at 25,000. Press material for its 2022 campaign called it the only university in the UK that is open access to all, with no minimum entry requirements.

Wikipedia describes it as the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students and gives 199,391 for 2023. Those numbers have not risen in a straight line. Times Higher Education reported in 2018 that they fell from 260,000 in 2009–10 to 174,000 in 2016–17, a drop mostly blamed on the 2012 change in student finance.

A punched-out O and a trumpet fanfare.

The university is known for its mark, a shield-like U with a round O punched out of it, set just off centre towards the upper left. Writing in Grafik, Harry Heptonstall dated the original to 1969. He said vice-chancellor Walter Perry dreamt up the concept and Douglas Clark, then the university’s director of design, produced some forty variations before the final form. He called the asymmetrical composition something that apparently had to be fought over during its creation, and read the result as respectful of heraldry while looking ahead.

The BBC carried that mark into British homes. The History of the BBC site says the university first broadcast on 3 January 1971 on BBC Two, in odd corners of the schedule, heralded by an animated logo and a fanfare: the opening of Leonard Salzedo’s Divertimento for Three Trumpets and Three Trombones. The BBC adds that the programmes gained a frequently parodied reputation for dated style and awkward presentation, because money to update them came only when a course was revised, and because the presenters were academics rather than broadcasters.

The writer Tim Worthington, looking back in 2013, remembered a blue shield on a yellow background, punning on the letters O and U. The Audiovisual Identity Database, a volunteer-edited archive of broadcast idents, sets the name in that first animation in Optima and traces the shield through versions into the 2010s, some of them recoloured to match BBC channel branding from 1984. Wikipedia says academic dress is based on blue and gold.

Course broadcasting ended in December 2006, and the BBC says teaching moved to DVD and the internet while the partnership turned to general-interest programmes such as Coast. The same year the university launched OpenLearn, releasing course materials for free access. In December 2012 it launched FutureLearn with a dozen UK university partners; Wikipedia says Global University Systems acquired that platform in December 2022.

Campus, broadcast and prospectus.

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.

From a single shield to a design system.

The shield has been reworked rather than replaced. Marketing Week reported in January 2005 that the university planned a new brand identity across the organisation, with a logo designed by Wolff Olins. Grafik’s Heptonstall later preferred the flat, single-colour mark to a glass-bevelled version then in use.

The largest recent change came in June 2022 with The Future is Open, a brand platform devised by a trio of Havas agencies, which Creative Salon reported on 27 June. The film, first shown in Gogglebox on 24 June, sends its characters through glowing portals reminiscent of the O in the logo. Campaign material described the shield as the starting point for a new design system with accessibility at its heart, meant in time to reach learning materials, annual reports and graduates’ certificates. It also called the university the UK’s only four nations university.

The brand has also had a hard period. In June 2017 Times Higher Education reported a plan to cut spending by nearly a quarter of the annual budget, with course closures and job losses likely. In April 2018 staff in the University and College Union backed a motion of no confidence in the vice-chancellor, who had said the teaching model let academics get away with not being teachers, and who later apologised. He quit on 13 April, and Times Higher Education reported in September 2018 that the university’s council was considering a smaller plan.

For a design guide, The Open University shows how much one small mark can carry when most of a university’s students study away from its campus. Compare University of Warwick and Lancaster University, two of the plate glass universities of the same decade. For this guide we use navy and a warm yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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