Two Hebrew words on an open book.

Yale began under another name. The colony’s General Court passed “An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School” on October 9, 1701, and in its early years the institution was simply the Collegiate School, opening in the home of its rector, Abraham Pierson. In 1718 it took the name of Elihu Yale, a Boston-born merchant who had made a fortune in Madras with the East India Company and who answered an appeal from Cotton Mather with a gift of goods and books toward a new building. The school was Yale College from 1718 and became Yale University in 1887.

The emblem at the centre of the identity is an open book on a blue shield, inscribed with two Hebrew words, Urim and Thummim, with the Latin motto Lux et Veritas — light and truth — on a scroll below. Dan Oren, writing in the Yale Alumni Magazine in March 2001 for the university’s tercentennial, traced the history of what he called the customs stamp on every Yale diploma. The trustees applied for a seal on October 17, 1722, the same day, he noted, that they dismissed Rector Timothy Cutler. There was no proof, Oren wrote, that a seal was actually used before 1736, when Yale’s Latin diplomas began to mention one; a legible seal survives on the 1749 master’s diploma of the future president Ezra Stiles, and he wrote that it is strikingly similar to the one used today.

The Hebrew words appear eight times in the Hebrew Bible, where they name the oracular objects worn by the high priest. Oren argued that their presence in Leviticus 8:8, the middle verse of the Pentateuch, suggests the book on the seal is the Bible itself, and that the college’s divinity textbook, by Johannes Wollebius, read the words as signifying Christ. Translating them as Lux et Veritas, he suggested, let the college stand for both the “light” of a liberal education and the “truth” of a religious tradition. He also compared Yale’s seal with a 1650 Harvard seal of three blank books and a chevron, and noted that Harvard did not make Veritas its motto on its regular seal until 1843.

A rowing pennant, a vote in 1894 and a silk in a vault.

Yale’s colour was not always blue. The New Journal, the Yale student magazine, told the story in October 2002. In 1853 the lawyer William Maxwell Evarts toasted “Old Yale forever! Ever green may she be!”, and the magazine wrote that green was Yale’s colour for half a century, until 1894, when blue officially replaced it. The university’s identity office dates the vote to the same year, saying the Yale Corporation adopted blue as the official colour, choosing a dark shade then used by the University of Oxford, and that as early as 1843 a winning boat in crew intramurals displayed a blue pennant lettered “Yale” in white.

Rowing carried the colour. The New Journal quoted the former university secretary Carl Lohmann tracing the blue to a commodore’s flag — a blue silk burgee heavily fringed with white — bought by Commodore Waite, and described a painting, The Victorious Crew of 1859, in which a man identified as Commodore Page holds a flag that may be its source. Within a decade the crew wore dark blue trousers and handkerchiefs, and the fans followed. An effort by the historian Franklin Bowditch Dexter in 1918 to trace the colour to a 1708 purchase of blue calico was, the magazine wrote, debunked twenty years later.

The standard was then fixed in cloth and paint. In 1938, under the Office of the Secretary, a piece of silk was chosen to preserve Yale Blue and a painting made to match it; the magazine gave two accounts of where the silk came from and said it appeared on President Charles Seymour’s inaugural robe and was kept in a vault in Woodbridge Hall. A second search in the mid-1950s used the Munsell colour system to match ink. In 2002 the magazine described the official Yale Blue as Pantone 289 and quoted the university printer John Gambell calling it “a strong, relatively dark blue, neither purple nor green, though it can be somewhat gray.” Today the identity office specifies a Yale Blue swatch book and a named printing-ink formula for spot colour, with brighter and grayer alternative blues and a warm gray for pairing.

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.

A private face from a Venetian book of 1495.

The third element of the identity is a typeface of its own, called simply Yale. The university’s identity office says it was designed by Matthew Carter, a member of the School of Art faculty, for use in the university’s print and digital publications, and that it is available free of charge to members of the university community for Yale-related work only. The office lists four core elements for every school and unit: the Yale logo, the Yale typeface, Yale Blue and a description of how the unit fits into the university, with the Office of the University Printer overseeing the guidelines.

The New Journal described the typeface’s ancestry in April 2012. Brandon Jackson reported that the university printer John Gambell had recently told staff designers that academic departments could no longer have their own logos set in favourite fonts, and that publications had to use the typeface, then eight years old, and the classic Yale Blue. Gambell, the magazine wrote, oversaw the creation of the typeface and designed a consistent campus signage system to standardise the brand. The face is based on the type of Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna, printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1495 with type cut by Francesco Griffo, the same source behind Monotype’s 1929 Bembo. Rather than use later digital versions of Bembo, which the university’s own type website said lacked the vigour of the original, Yale commissioned Carter to draw a private version of the 1495 letters. Gambell told the magazine that the font’s restriction to the community gave it something like the cachet of a secret handshake.

The typeface has kept growing. The identity office says the font family includes small capitals, ligatures, Yale marks, arrows and a specially drawn manicule adapted from an illustration in Manutius’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, that Carter & Cone expanded it in 2024 with characters for transcribing and transliterating languages written in non-Latin scripts, and that the result is named Yale 2024, alongside a Yale Display cut with sharper serifs for large sizes.

For a design guide, Yale is a study in fixing a tradition after the fact: a seal explained by its Hebrew words, a colour settled by a vote and a stored silk, and a typeface revived from a Venetian book. Compare Harvard and Princeton. For this guide we use dark blue, ink and vellum with an Aldine serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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