A founding date chosen in 1899 and a motto that was once rewritten.

The University of Pennsylvania grew out of a proposal by Benjamin Franklin, who in 1749 published a pamphlet proposing an academy in Philadelphia and then convened its trustees. The institution became the Academy and Charitable School in the Province of Pennsylvania, received a collegiate charter as the College of Philadelphia in 1755, and in 1791 took the name University of Pennsylvania. Its official founding date is earlier. English Wikipedia, citing a 2011 university publication, says the university uses 1740, a date the Trustees adopted in 1899 and tied to a schoolhouse built that year for an earlier school that never opened; the university archivist Mark Frazier Lloyd was quoted saying good cases could be made for 1749, 1751 or 1755.

The motto came from the college’s provost. The University Archives say Provost William Smith chose a line from Horace, quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt, for an imagined ideal college he had described, and that the original seal of 1755 bore the shortened inscription Sine Moribus Vanae. The archives tell an unusual story about its middle years. Near the end of the nineteenth century, they say, a wag offered a ribald mistranslation of the seal’s motto, which so distressed the Trustees that when the seal was redesigned in 1899 the word Literae was inserted. In 1932 a Trustees’ committee restored Leges sine moribus vanae — “Laws without morals are useless” — as the motto.

The same committee shaped the seal. The archives quote the 1932 resolution calling the seal then in use “confused” and asking for a new one following the 1755 original: the words Universitas Pennsylvaniensis around the border, the motto in a minor position, and at the centre a pile of seven books on a desk, labelled for theology, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, logic, rhetoric and grammar. The archives describe the seal as the signature of the Trustees on official documents, and the arms, by contrast, as a decorative symbol.

Franklin’s dolphin and a red and blue from Saratoga.

The arms were approved in 1932 and adopted in 1933, according to the University Archives. Their heraldic description reads: in the chief, red, two open books and a dolphin, silver; in the ground, silver, a blue chevron with three silver plates. The archives say the design memorialises two influences on the university’s founding: the three plates come from the arms of the Penn family, proprietors of the colony, and the dolphin comes from the Franklin shield. The open books denote an institution of learning.

The colours began on a running track. The archives say red and blue are believed to have been chosen by a student representing the university at a track meet in Saratoga, New York, in 1874. The Athletic Association adopted them for university teams in 1876, and the Trustees used them in 1895 for the academic hood worn by graduates. When the Trustees adopted a design for the university flag in 1910, they specified that its colours conform to the standards the United States government used in its flags, so the archives conclude that Penn’s red and blue are officially the hues of the national ensign. The teams are called the Quakers, and are also known as the Red and Blue.

The modern brand standards keep the pairing. The university’s web identity guidelines say the colours of the Penn web are inspired by the insignia, with Penn Red and Penn Blue as the dominant colours and a set of accents around them. For type on the central website they name two families available through Google Fonts, the serif EB Garamond and the sans serif Roboto, and they say the central homepage was redesigned and launched in the winter of 2021. Schools and departments that want to share the central identity are encouraged to use these colour and typographic standards, while the homepage’s own look is reserved for top-level pages.

Design and documentation.

A university’s visual identity is usually built in layers that arrived at different times. The earliest layer is often a seal, a circular device made to authenticate documents, typically carrying a Latin legend, a founding date and emblems such as books, a sun, a lamp or a tree. Seals were made to be pressed into wax or printed small, so their detail rewards close reading rather than quick recognition.

A second layer is the school colour. Many colleges settled on a colour in the nineteenth century for rowing crews, baseball teams and student banners, and only later wrote the shade down as a specification for print and screen. Once a colour is tied to a team, it tends to stay, because students and supporters carry it on clothing and flags.

A third layer is the mascot, an animal or figure adopted for athletics, which often gets its own set of drawings that change with each generation of designers. The newest layer is the wordmark: a name set in a chosen typeface, sometimes paired with a simplified shield, written up in an identity manual so that departments, publications and websites use one consistent signature beside the older emblems.

From PENN in capitals to Penn beside a shield.

The everyday name is short. English Wikipedia, citing the brand standards, says Penn is a registered trademark used as the primary substitute for the full name, and in the early 2000s the signature mark was the word in bold capitals. The Daily Pennsylvanian, the independent student newspaper, reported in August 2002 that the capitalised “PENN” logo then on admissions brochures, T-shirts and signs was being replaced by a mark that set the name in upper and lower case as “Penn” and added the university’s shield. Lori Doyle, the vice president for communications, told the paper that research had found widespread confusion between Penn and Penn State, and that the schools, centres, athletics and admissions all used different marks; President Judith Rodin said she saw every shade of red and blue imaginable. The paper said the consultancy Deutsch developed the options, that the final two split respondents evenly, and that administrators let Deutsch make the final choice.

The programme reached the schools and the playing fields. In September 2004 the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that, under a “One University” initiative, the various schools had adopted logos sharing the common university shield, and that the athletics department had worked with the New York branding firm SME on a new identity whose logo emphasised the shield. The same project produced a new costume for the Quaker mascot, now with a tricorn hat and ponytail and a soft fabric head in place of a papier-mâché one; reaction, the paper said, was mixed, with some fans comparing it to a pirate.

The changeover took time. In January 2005 the paper reported that the old capitalised logo was finally being phased out of the bookstore, that the new mark — the word Penn beside the shield — had been built to tie together the emblems of the various schools, and that the athletic teams’ “split P” had been updated in 2004.

For a design guide, Penn shows a set of arms doing quiet work: a dolphin and three plates fixed in 1933, and colours tied by the Trustees to the national flag. Compare Princeton and Dartmouth College. For this guide we use red, blue and silver with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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