Manhattan, 1896 to 1941.

Parsons School of Design started under another man’s name. Wikipedia says the American painter William Merritt Chase founded it in Manhattan in 1896 as the Chase School, after taking a small group of artists away from the Art Students League of New York in search of a less traditional institution. Two years later, in 1898, it came under new management and became the New York School of Art.

The man whose name the school now carries arrived as a teacher. Wikipedia says Chase hired Frank Alvah Parsons as a professor in 1904, that Parsons studied at the same time under the artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University, and that he became sole director of the school in 1911. Wikipedia says he saw the growing importance of art and design to industry, and it lists the school’s name from 1909 to 1941 as the New York School of Fine and Applied Art.

Parsons also took the school abroad. The New York Times reported on 11 November 2012 that Parsons, as director of what was then the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, started a Paris programme in 1921. The same report adds, in a single line, that the school was renamed for him in 1941. Wikipedia gives the same year for the change to Parsons School of Design, made in honour of the director whose teaching had shaped it.

The Paris years left an object behind. The Times called the Parsons Table, with its square legs set flush with the ends of the tabletop, the school’s enduring physical symbol, and said it came out of a drafting exercise at the Paris campus taught by the interior designer Jean-Michel Frank. The paper said the French programme closed for a time during the Second World War.

Two more names followed. Wikipedia says that when the parent institution was renamed The New School in 2005, the college became Parsons The New School for Design, and its list of former names places the end of that form in 2015, when the school returned to Parsons School of Design.

Greenwich Village and a return to Paris.

Since 1970 Parsons has been part of a larger university. Wikipedia says that in that year, through the efforts of David C. Levy, later dean of Parsons, the school joined the New School for Social Research, which let it widen its degree programmes and research. The New York Times reported in 2012 that the Paris branch was part of the 1970 merger.

The Paris link loosened over time. In its report of 11 November 2012, the Times quoted the school’s executive dean, Joel Towers, saying the arrangement became more of a licensing agreement. It said that in 2010 the former licensee changed its name to the Paris College of Art, leaving The New School free to return to the city under the Parsons name. The paper said the new Paris campus was on the Rue Saint-Roch and would be introduced at a reception at the Palais de Tokyo on 29 November that year. It quoted Towers describing it less as a satellite than as a node in a network of shared practices, and quoted the New School president, David E. Van Zandt, on a more fluid approach to international education.

In New York, the school’s buildings sit in and around Greenwich Village. Wikipedia says the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center occupies 70 Fifth Avenue, a twelve-storey building at the corner of West 13th Street built in 1914 as an office and loft building and acquired by The New School in 1972. It houses galleries, an auditorium, the Parsons Making Center and the New School Archives. Wikipedia places the School of Constructed Environments, with its architecture, interior, lighting and product design studios, in the Parsons East building at 25 East 13th Street.

The newest of the large buildings is shared with the rest of the university. Wikipedia says the University Center at 65 Fifth Avenue, a sixteen-storey building designed by Roger Duffy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, opened officially in January 2014; its Parsons article gives 2013 as the year the building was completed. It replaced a former department store that New School patrons Vera and Albert List had helped the university buy and renovate in 1967. Wikipedia lists sewing and construction classrooms, a shoemaking studio and drawing studios among the rooms Parsons uses there, alongside a library and the university’s archives and special collections. The building matters to the identity as well: its wayfinding lettering became the starting point for the typeface that now sets the Parsons name.

Founders, buildings and the walls between studios.

An art school’s identity rarely starts with a logo. It usually starts with a name, and that name is often a person’s: a founder who opened the first studio, a teacher whose classes drew the first students, or a benefactor whose gift paid for a building. Over decades those names get shortened, merged, abbreviated into initials or folded into a parent institution, and each change leaves a trace on letterheads, signs and diplomas.

Buildings carry as much of the identity as any mark. A converted warehouse, a purpose-built studio block or a hillside campus becomes the image people picture when they hear the name, and architects’ choices of glass, steel, brick or concrete end up doing the work a brand book would do elsewhere.

Then there are the everyday surfaces: lettering painted on studio doors, signage on stairwells, and above all the posters, catalogues and websites made each year for graduate shows. These are often designed by students or staff rather than agencies, so the look shifts from year to year while the name stays fixed. For a designer, the useful lesson is how a short wordmark has to sit comfortably beside work that changes every season.

Neue, two bars and Parsons Red.

Parsons’ current look belongs to a system drawn for the whole of The New School. Fast Company reported on 30 March 2015, the day it was unveiled, that Pentagram had redesigned the university’s identity, with partner Paula Scher in charge of the work. The writer Carey Dunne described a structure in which the names of the individual schools, among them Parsons, Lang, Performing Arts and Social Research, sit underneath a main New School logo. Scher told the magazine the system had to work however the schools were listed, so that they would always look like parts of the same organisation even as departments changed. “It had to be flexible,” she said.

The typeface carries the idea. Fast Company said the identity uses a custom typeface called Neue, named for The New School, in which each letter comes in three widths: regular, extended and very extended. It said Neue is a customised version of Irma, the typeface used in the environmental graphics of the University Center, designed by the Dutch typographer Peter Bil’ak. Scher commissioned Bil’ak to draw Neue and to program it with an algorithm that mixes the widths, so that the same word can come out in many different combinations. The magazine gave the example that the A in Parsons is wider than the A in Lang, so each school’s name has its own typographic character while staying in one typeface.

Two further elements tie the system to buildings and streets. Fast Company said the two bold bars underlining the new logo were inspired by the university’s Joseph Urban building on 12th Street, so that the identity would sit comfortably on signs there. It said the programme would be printed on banners in Parsons Red, which it described as a bright, orangey colour, and quoted Scher saying that people walking through the New School neighbourhood would see “a lot of red, a lot of double stripes.” She added: “It creates a language for the school.” Wikipedia lists the colours as white, black and Parsons Red.

For a design guide, Parsons shows how a school’s name can stay fixed while the letters that spell it change width from one word to the next, and how a colour and two plain bars can link a page to a street. Compare Pratt Institute and Central Saint Martins, two other art schools in this collection. For this guide we use Parsons-style red, graphite and black with a variable-width sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Parsons School of Design’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.