From a normal school downtown to a campus in Westwood.

UCLA’s roots lie in teacher training. In March 1881 the California legislature authorised a southern branch of the California State Normal School, which opened in downtown Los Angeles on 29 August 1882 and became the independent Los Angeles State Normal School in 1887, English Wikipedia says. The University of California’s constitution protected it from being ordered to open a campus, so local supporters pressed the Board of Regents to accept the normal school voluntarily.

On 23 May 1919 Governor William D. Stephens signed Assembly Bill 626, which turned the normal school into the Southern Branch of the University of California, Wikipedia records; it opened on 15 September 1919 with a two-year Junior College alongside the Teachers College. A fourth year of instruction followed in 1923, and the first bachelor’s degrees were awarded in 1925. As the Vermont Avenue site filled up, the Regents announced a new site west of Beverly Hills in 1925.

The name came next. On 1 February 1927 the Regents renamed the Southern Branch the University of California at Los Angeles, and the same year ground was broken in Westwood on land sold by the developers Edwin and Harold Janss, for whom the Janss Steps are named. The Westwood campus opened to students in 1929 with four buildings around a quad, Royce Hall and Haines Hall on the north and Powell Library and Kinsey Hall (now Kaplan Hall) on the south, reached by the 87 Janss Steps. The university’s own guidelines are titled simply “UCLA Brand Guidelines” and open under the heading “We are one UCLA”, asking every department to use the same campus logo, colour palette and fonts.

Cubs, Grizzlies, Bruins and a bear in costume.

The team names trace the campus’s relationship with Berkeley. English Wikipedia says the Southern Branch football team was first known as the Cubs, a nod to the California Bears in the north, and in 1923 became the Grizzlies. When the teams joined the Pacific Coast Conference in 1926, which already included the Montana Grizzlies, the Southern Branch student council adopted Bruins, a name offered by the student council at Berkeley.

The mascot has gone through many forms. Wikipedia says the Bruins rented live bears for home football games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the 1930s; in the 1950s students and alumni brought a bear cub called “Little Joe Bruin” to Westwood, and in 1961 alumni bought a bear named Josephine. A costumed Joe Bruin appeared in 1963, and in 1967 a female student taking on the role created Josephine “Josie” Bruin.

The Los Angeles Times reported on 25 January 1996 that a brawnier, teeth-baring Joe Bruin had been unveiled outside Ackerman Union in front of students and the band. Officials from the university’s marketing and athletics departments told the paper that the older, cheerier Joe had stopped appearing on team uniforms; a committee of school officials had chosen the new look from designs supplied by Studio M, a design firm in Long Beach. The Times said the old Joe and Josephine would become “mascot emeritus”, that a plusher Josephine would follow, and that a “Little Joe” bear tot was planned for younger fans. The paper noted that Joe had already worn several different looks over his history, and Wikipedia says the costume design has kept changing since.

Seals, arms, colours and wordmarks.

University identities are usually built from a small set of inherited parts. The earliest is often a coat of arms or seal: a shield with charges such as books, lamps, crosses, trees or animals, sometimes granted by a heraldic authority and sometimes adopted locally, and frequently redrawn over the decades as printing methods and tastes change. Around the shield sits a motto, often in Latin, which tends to survive every redesign because it is written into charters, diplomas and gates.

Next come the school colours. Many institutions name a single shade and attach it to the place, so that a colour word becomes shorthand for the whole community; style guides later pin that shade down with print and screen values. A wordmark, usually set in a serif or a custom typeface, then carries the name on letterheads, signs and websites, while the seal is kept for formal occasions.

Finally there are the athletic marks: nicknames, mascots and lettering that often grew up separately from the academic identity, through student newspapers, coaches and costume characters, and were only later folded into one licensing and brand system.

Powder blue, True Blue and a published palette.

The colours began as Berkeley’s. In the early years, Wikipedia says, UCLA used the same Yale blue and gold as the University of California at Berkeley. When Red Sanders arrived to coach football for the 1949 season, he redesigned the uniforms, lightening the navy to a baby blue that he thought would look better on the field and on film, calling it “Powder Keg Blue”, and adding a gold loop on the shoulders known as the UCLA Stripe. Later shades followed the kit makers: a darker True Blue developed with Adidas in 2002 and used by all teams from 2003, a return to Powderkeg Blue in 2017 when Under Armour became the supplier, and in 2021 an alignment by Nike and the Jordan Brand with the UCLA Blue that academic and administrative units had used since 2004.

The university’s brand guidelines now publish exact values. They specify UCLA Blue as PANTONE 2383C (hex #2774AE) and UCLA Gold as PANTONE 109C (hex #FFD100), say the colours evoke the blue of sea and sky and the gold of the sun and wildflowers, especially the California poppy, and add that the blue has always mattered more than the gold: “a field of blue with a gold accent says UCLA”, the guidelines say, while the reverse does not. Secondary blues and golds and brighter tertiary colours extend the palette, with tertiary colours kept to graphics for accessibility.

Type and marks are defined in the same place. The guidelines name Karbon, a geometric sans in seven weights, as the print font, with three custom versions commissioned by UCLA (thin reveal, bold outline and bold open outline), and Helvetica, Arial and Roboto for digital use. They separate a Campus Logo for the academic institution and its departments, a Script Logo reserved for Intercollegiate Athletics on uniforms and sportswear, a Campus Seal and a University Seal for formal and ceremonial purposes, and historical mascot illustrations whose use is restricted.

For a design guide, UCLA shows how a colour can be adjusted for the camera, the kit supplier and the screen and then pinned to a single published value; compare Stanford for another California university identity and the Los Angeles Lakers for a Los Angeles team in its own blue-and-gold history. For this guide we use UCLA Blue, gold and white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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