A royal charter, a secular rename and a new city name.

The University of Toronto began as King’s College. English Wikipedia says a royal charter was issued by George IV on 15 March 1827, creating a college “with the style and privileges of a University” in the town of York, in what was then Upper Canada. York took the name Toronto when it was incorporated as a city in 1834, so the institution was older than the name it now carries; The Varsity, the university’s student newspaper, made the same point in a 2011 feature on the arms.

Under John Strachan, the Anglican bishop who led it, King’s College was closely tied to the Church of England. Wikipedia says reformist politicians pushed for the college to be secularised, and that in 1849 the elected government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and to cut its ties with the church. The Varsity gives the same year for the vote. Strachan, Wikipedia says, had already resigned and went on to open Trinity College as a separate Anglican foundation, and University College was set up as the university’s nondenominational teaching branch.

That rename matters for the identity. The new university did not inherit a formal coat of arms from the colonial college. The Varsity reported in 2011 that a researcher writing to the university archives in the 1970s was incredulous that Strachan had founded a chartered college named after the sovereign without a proper insignia. The arms that followed were a product of the secular university, although they kept a reference to the royal charter: the crown at the top of the shield, which The Varsity says recalls the original King’s College.

The athletic name came later still. Wikipedia says the nickname Varsity Blues was not used consistently until the 1930s; before that the teams were called “Varsity”, “The Big Blue”, “The Blue and White” or simply “The Blues”, and “The Blue and White” remains a song heard at games.

Books, a beaver, a crown and an oak.

The coat of arms is the earliest layer of the identity, and its history is unusually well documented. The Varsity reported on 28 March 2011 that the university senate approved a recommendation to accept arms in 1857. University archives, the paper said, describe an early design close to today’s but held by two supporters, Minerva and Victoria. English Wikipedia credits the 1857 design to Daniel Wilson, who later became the university’s president.

An 1887 article by Wilson, as summarised by The Varsity, described a crown, two open books that “need no interpretation”, a beaver and, on top, a broad maple. By 1917 the board of governors had noticed that versions of the insignia across campus no longer matched. The paper says the board petitioned the College of Arms in London — Canada had no heraldic authority of its own until 1988 — to settle a proper grant for both the university and University College. Both documents were completed on 17 August 1917, and the crest tree changed in the process from a maple to an oak.

The blazon that resulted reads, in plain English: a blue shield with two open books and, below them, a beaver, under a silver band carrying the Royal Crown; above the shield, an oak tree with gold acorns. The crown recalls King’s College, the books stand for learning, and the beaver is a Canadian emblem. Wikipedia says the armorial bearings were registered with the Canadian Heraldic Authority on 20 May 2016, and that use of the arms is controlled centrally by the university.

The beaver has drifted more than the rest. The Varsity recalled a 2000 commentary in the university’s Bulletin by university graphic designer Caz Zyvatkauskas, who described how successive redrawings softened the animal, with teeth retracted, a slouching posture and soft paws, until it looked closer to a figure from a can of children’s pasta than the vigorous beaver of older versions.

The motto, Velut arbor aevo, is usually rendered “as a tree through the ages”. Both The Varsity and Wikipedia trace it to Horace’s Odes (I.12), where the fame of Marcellus grows “like a tree” over unseen time. The oak in the crest is a visual echo of that line. Wikipedia notes the motto belongs to the full heraldic achievement rather than to the shield itself.

Arms, mottos, colours and wordmarks.

A university’s identity usually begins with a coat of arms, a shield granted or adopted to mark the institution in the way a family or a town would be marked. The charges on that shield often carry meaning: books stand for learning, crowns for a royal charter or patron, and heraldic animals and birds borrowed from a founder’s own arms or from the landscape of the region. Beneath the shield sits a motto, very often in Latin, compressing an institutional purpose into a handful of words that survive every later redesign.

Alongside the arms, universities often settle on one or two institutional colours. These begin in academic dress, rowing jackets and sports kit, and only later become specified tones in a style manual, with print and screen values set out for staff and suppliers.

The modern layer is the wordmark: a typeset name paired with a simplified shield, built to work at small sizes on websites, apps and signage. Many institutions now keep the full arms for ceremonial use, such as degree certificates and convocation, while the simplified mark carries day-to-day communications. Athletics programmes frequently run a separate family of marks with their own team names and mascots.

Azure, blue and white, and a shield used with a wordmark.

The official tincture of the shield is simply azure. The Varsity pointed out that heraldry does not fix a precise shade: the College of Arms leaves it to the artist, as long as the blue is not too light. In practice the university has long been associated with blue and white, and the colour pairing reaches well beyond campus. Wikipedia says that when Conn Smythe, who had played for and coached the Varsity Blues, took over the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1927, the professional team adopted the Blues’ familiar blue-and-white sweater design — a link worth knowing for anyone comparing the two identities.

Wikipedia describes the arms as the university’s primary emblem, appearing on the university banner, in the full heraldic achievement and inside the logos of campuses, faculties and departments, as well as in the university’s own logo. It adds that the arms are rarely used alone and are hardly ever modified. In other words, the day-to-day signature pairs the shield with a set name, while the colleges keep their own emblems and do not usually use the university arms.

For a design reader, the University of Toronto is a lesson in how heraldry ages. The shield’s content has stayed recognisable since 1857 — books, beaver, crown — while the drawing style has shifted with each generation of designers, sometimes in ways people inside the university noticed and argued about in print. The motto supplies a visual idea, the tree, that sits naturally in the crest and in ceremonial use. The athletics identity runs on a parallel track, with the Varsity Blues name and the blue and white kit carrying the colours into sport.

For a design guide, the University of Toronto shows a nineteenth-century shield kept stable while its drawing changes, a Latin motto turned into a crest, and a blue and white pairing shared with a professional hockey club. Compare it with the Toronto Maple Leafs, whose sweater borrowed the Blues’ colours, and with McGill University, chartered in the same decade, or with the arms of the University of Oxford. For this guide we use azure, a pale blue and white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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