A university named for a son.

Stanford’s full name explains its origin. The university says Leland and Jane Stanford founded the Leland Stanford Junior University in 1885 in memory of their only son, Leland Junior, who died of typhoid fever in Florence, Italy, in 1884. Its own timeline dates the Founding Grant — the deed that set up the university — to November 11, 1885, the laying of the cornerstone to May 14, 1887, and Opening Day to October 1, 1891. The campus was the Stanfords’ Palo Alto farm — “the Farm,” as Stanford magazine still calls it.

Its emblem came from a single tree. Stanford magazine explained in March 2019 that soon after the university opened, President David Starr Jordan persuaded the faculty to adopt an unofficial, “temporary” seal with an image of a tall tree and a motto in German. The tree was el palo alto, the redwood whose Spanish name — literally “tall stick” — also gave the neighbouring town its name. A 2018 piece in The Stanford Daily traces the name to the expedition of Gaspar de Portolà in 1769, whose men camped beneath the tree.

The motto had a turbulent career. Jordan took Die Luft der Freiheit weht, usually translated as “the wind of freedom blows,” from a remark by the Reformation figure Ulrich von Hutten, which was originally made in Latin. The magazine noted that former president Gerhard Casper pointed out a mistranslation: Luft means air rather than wind. In 1917, with the United States entering the First World War, the university dropped the German motto from the seal, emphasising that it had never been official; it returned after the war and was dropped again in the Second World War.

For more than a century, the magazine wrote, neither the seal nor the motto was official, and different schools and divisions used different versions — some with what looked like a cluster of sheep, others with an orchard on the hills behind the tree. In 2003 the university standardised the seal and made it official; the sheep and the orchard went. The motto, though it keeps its place on the official seal, remains unofficial.

A wordmark drawn from the Main Quad.

The newest part of the identity is the type. The Stanford Daily reported on November 15, 2012 that the university had begun rolling out a new wordmark for all university-affiliated websites and promotional materials. According to the university’s spokeswoman, Lisa Lapin, the new Stanford signature used a free, open-source font drawn to echo the curves of the Main Quad; the university had paid a licensing fee for the font it replaced. The identity website, the paper noted, told users to treat the signature “as artwork, not as typography.”

The change was narrow. The Block “S,” the Block “S” with the tree and the university seal stayed the same; only the signature changed, and the word “University” was dropped from the wordmark so it could be applied more flexibly. The new mark was complemented by two typefaces for print and online use, Source Sans Pro and Crimson Text. Lapin cited complaints that the old signature did not reproduce well in signage, could not be read from a distance on banners, did not suit long campus unit names and was hard to sew onto clothing; it was also unsuited to small mobile screens.

The design firm was Bright, based in Marina del Rey, California, chosen through what Lapin called an extensive request-for-proposals process; the Daily reported that President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy selected the wordmark from the options presented. Brad Hayward, the senior director for strategic communications, said the principle was flexibility of use and the digital environment “first and foremost,” and that schools and departments could adopt the updated identity voluntarily as they were ready. The identity website had been announced on October 25.

Today that website sets out the system. It says the university’s marks are proprietary and protected, that Cardinal red has been Stanford’s official colour since the university’s earliest days, and that the university-approved colours Cardinal red (Pantone 201C) and Palo Alto green (Pantone 3298C) must be used for logos. Accent colours, it says, are drawn from the main campus architecture and the California landscape. Its typography pages name the Source Sans Pro family, with Roboto as an alternate, and the guide describes its creative elements as tools rather than mandates.

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.

A tree that marches with the band.

The tree is also a character. The Stanford Daily reported in November 2025 that the Stanford Tree was turning 50: it made its debut at halftime of the 1975 Big Game against the University of California, Berkeley. The paper traced its origin to 1972, when the university discontinued its official mascot, the “Indian.” In the years that followed, the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band proposed a series of deliberately odd replacements, and the Tree came out of a late-night brainstorm between two band members, Eric Strandberg and Bob Tiffany, on a drive to a game against USC.

The original Tree, Chris Hutson, built her costume overnight from red construction paper, a scuba backpack and a styrofoam cone, the Daily wrote. The all-red design soon gave way to the green one familiar today after the costume was repeatedly mistaken on the field for a chicken with ruffled feathers. Each Tree now designs a new costume around an aluminium frame, so the character changes form from year to year. The Daily calls it the university’s unofficial mascot; it belongs to the band, and the teams are represented by the colour, Cardinal.

The identity has several layers, each with its own date. The seal, standardised in 2003, carries the redwood and the German motto; the Block “S” and the Block “S” with the tree were left unchanged in 2012; the 2012 signature carries the name; and the identity guide supplies the palette, with Cardinal red and Palo Alto green fixed by Pantone reference and accents drawn from campus architecture and the landscape. The tree also turns up well beyond official documents: Hutson told the Daily in 2025 that there is a tree on the trash cans, on the flag at the entrance to the Quad and on backpacks and sweatshirts.

For a design guide, Stanford shows how a single landscape feature — one redwood — can anchor both a seal and a band mascot, while the type and colour system around it is updated separately. Compare Harvard and Cambridge University. For this guide we use cardinal, redwood, green and sandstone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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