A college named for a state, a hall named for a prince.

For 150 years, Princeton was not officially called Princeton. The institution began in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, and it took the name Princeton University only in 1896, as it celebrated its 150th anniversary. The university’s archivists note that it was known simply as “Princeton” as early as 1756, the year it settled in the town.

The building at its centre supplies much of the later symbolism. The Daily Princetonian reported in December 2006 that New Jersey’s governor, Jonathan Belcher, suggested that the college’s main building be named after the royal Dutch house of Orange-Nassau when the college moved to Princeton from Newark in 1756. The hall honoured William III — William of Orange, the prince of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 — and Nassau Hall, in turn, gave the college its colour.

The shield came with the new name. According to the same 2006 article, the familiar shield was created in 1896, when the college became Princeton University. Its upper part shows an open Bible inscribed VET NOV TESTAMENTUM, for the Old and New Testaments; below is a chevron, “denoting the rafters of a building,” in the words of the minutes of the trustees’ meeting of February 13, 1896. A ribbon carries the motto Dei sub numine viget, which the paper translated as “under God she flourishes,” and the official seal, used on diplomas, is encircled by the Latin for “the seal of Princeton University.” A report in the university’s Mudd Library, quoted by the paper, says the motto was already old and appears on the 1760 engraving of Nassau Hall; in 1945 the university archivist Henry Savage wrote that the Bible reflected the college’s Presbyterian founders.

The university’s Princetoniana pages describe the shield as adapted from the central image of the University Seal, the corporate signature of the trustees that is embossed on diplomas and printed on official documents, with the motto ribbon below it optional. A version of the shield appears on the Bicentennial Banner, used at Commencement, Alumni Day and other ceremonies since 1947.

A ribbon, a necktie and a regatta.

The colours were a student initiative. The Daily Princetonian told the story in June 2019: in April 1866 a first-year student named George Ward, noticing that Princeton had no colours of its own, suggested orange, in allusion to William III, the Prince of Orange, after whom Nassau Hall was named. On June 26, 1867, at a baseball game at Yale, Ward gave his teammates badges of orange ribbon with their class year, “’69 B.B.C.,” printed in black — the colours’ recorded debut together, the paper wrote. In October 1868 the faculty allowed students “to adopt and wear as the college badge an orange-colored ribbon bearing upon it the word ‘Princeton.’”

The black was less deliberate. The house of Nassau’s own colours were orange and blue, and the University Archives wrote in November 2020 that orange and black “came about largely through repetition more than intent”; baseball uniforms of 1874 still had orange trimming on a greyish blue. A student, William Libbey Jr., popularised the pairing. Princetoniana says he wore a necktie advertised as bearing “The Duke of Nassau’s colors” on a dare in 1873, and in 1874 arranged for orange and black ribbon for the freshman crew’s hatbands at an intercollegiate regatta in Saratoga, New York, selling it at a hotel there as “Princeton’s colors.” When the freshmen won, the ribbon sold out.

Other teams followed. In 1876, the Daily Princetonian wrote, the football team played Yale in black jerseys with an orange “P” on the chest, and in 1888 two students, Clarence Mitchell and Ernest Carter, wrote a song called “The Orange and the Black.” The archivists add that by then Princeton was associated with three symbols — the tiger, the cannon and the tiger lily — all with black in their colour schemes.

The colours became official with the name. In 1896 the trustees adopted orange and black, choosing them for the academic gowns, according to the Daily Princetonian; Princetoniana records that Professor Allan Marquand objected that orange and blue, the true colours of the house of Nassau, would be preferable. Fixing the exact shade took longer. Princetoniana credits the architect and trustee Stephen Voorhees, who found there was no reference standard and dyed a piece of silk from a sample of bunting used to welcome Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in 1941; that shade is now standardised as Pantone 158. The Daily Princetonian dates the standard to 1959, while the University Archives say the trustees adopted an official shade of “Princeton Orange” in 1960.

Design and documentation.

University identities are usually layered rather than single marks. The earliest layer is often heraldic: a coat of arms or shield, granted or adopted at some point in an institution’s history, built from a small vocabulary of charges such as books, crowns, lions, crosses and stars, and carrying its own fixed rules about tinctures and how elements are arranged. Alongside it many institutions keep a seal, a circular device with a legend running around the edge, historically used to authenticate documents and today reserved for diplomas, formal notices and ceremonies.

A second layer is colour. Academic colours often began on the river, the sports field or in ceremonial dress, and over time a named shade became shorthand for the place itself. Because such names predate digital standards, the exact tone can vary between printed matter, kit and screens until an identity programme fixes reference values.

The newest layer is the wordmark and typography. Modern identity work tends to simplify a detailed shield for small sizes, pair it with a set name in a chosen typeface, and set rules for clear space, colour use and how departments sit beneath the main mark, so that hundreds of units can publish without drifting apart.

From striped jerseys to a kit of parts.

The tiger grew out of the colours rather than the other way round. The Daily Princetonian wrote in 2019 that Princeton football players of the early 1880s wore orange and black stripes, prompting sportswriters to call them “tigers”; in 1890 the New York Tribune reported that “the Princeton tigers come running out on the field.” The name spread to student publications and eating clubs — the Inn club renamed itself Tiger Inn in 1893 — and later to statues around campus.

The modern system has two strands. In September 2004 the university introduced a graphic identity for athletics built as a “kit of parts,” a coordinated set of elements drawn from Princeton’s traditional iconography: the shield, a boldly drawn varsity “P,” a new typeface, the tiger in a variety of animated silhouettes, and orange and black. Gary Walters, then director of athletics, said the aim was an identity that would cover all the department’s programmes. In 2007, Princetoniana says, the shield itself was redrawn as part of a new university graphic identity, which set specific typographic treatments of the name and shield — the “signature” — in the typeface family Princeton Monticello, derived from Monticello, an 18th-century American typeface.

The shield also comes in grades of formality. In 2006 Laurel Cantor, then director of publications in the Office of Communications, told the Daily Princetonian that her office used two main versions: a “classic” shield with the ribbon and Latin motto for ceremonial uses such as awards and programmes, and a “graphic identity” shield without them for business items. Commercial use required approval from the university’s trademark licensing office, and Cantor said alcohol and tobacco companies were not permitted to use it.

For a design guide, Princeton shows how a colour can be fixed long before the institution formally adopts it, and how a single shield can be worn plain or adorned depending on the occasion. Compare Harvard and Columbia University. For this guide we use orange, black and stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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