March 31, 2020
Dear Law School Community,
As you may or may not have noticed, Berkeley Law has been phasing into alignment with the Berkeley brand “look” since early fall semester. The next step in this alignment process will be transitioning to a Berkeley-aligned logo.
I’m writing today to explain where this is coming from, and so that no one feels surprised when the new logo starts appearing everywhere. Also, to solicit your help in identifying places where the logo needs to be swapped, and potentially to suss out challenges that we can work through together.
Why change? And why now?
This is not change for change’s sake. Alignment with the Berkeley brand is now mandated by the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost and enforced through the Office of Business Contracts and Brand Protection.
Berkeley’s main office of Public Affairs has been encouraging alignment since they developed a comprehensive brand identity system in 2013. As of October 2019, the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost began mandating that campus units must adhere to the brand guidelines, and campus procurement has made it mandatory that unit branding be approved by the central marketing team in Public Affairs. No branded products (aka “swag”) can be ordered if the unit does not follow approved campus branding. Accordingly, nearly every major school and college on campus has now rebranded themselves in line with the guidelines, or is somewhere in the process, including the College of Letters & Science, the College of Natural Resources and most recently, Berkeley Engineering.
Even were that not the case, getting in step now is the right thing to do. Berkeley is one of the planet’s most renowned universities (ranked world’s #1 public, #4 overall), and Berkeley Law is great in part because Berkeley is great. A Berkeley-aligned logo will do a better job leveraging Berkeley’s iconic stature and ethos, especially important for the law school as we move past the Boalt Hall days and grow our reach internationally.
Please see below for more information regarding the rollout plan.
Phasing in the New Look and Logo
First, a look at the new logo:
Aligning Berkeley Law with the Berkeley brand has been a concerted and coordinated effort, including numerous cross-departmental conversations and interdepartmental collaborations.
We began the process by switching to the Berkeley brand color palette this fall for print pieces such as the Transcript magazine, the giving impact report, admissions collateral, and the new faculty and recent scholarship brochures.
More recently we’ve begun using Berkeley’s light-inspired graphic elements (apertures, tessellations, and prisms) in the digital realm, including the monthly “inter alia” email for alumni, images for the website, video intros and outros, gifs for social media, and so forth.
It’s all been fairly seamless and well-received. In fact, the reason you may or may not have noticed these changes is because the visual elements are straight from the Berkeley design playbook. It should all look and feel reassuringly familiar to anyone even passingly acquainted with the university.
Completing this transition will take time. Over the next few months, you’ll begin to see all of the law school’s visuals aligning around this new direction. The first step will be to add the new logo to our most publicly facing areas, updating the website and adding a brand resource page, rebranding the magazine, email and social media logos. By mid-April, we should be able to redo logos for centers, clinics, programs, and departments. We’ll also be working on aligning stationery, templates for email, flyers, reports, presentations, and word docs. From there, we’ll be onto other templates (by request), data visualizations, web & branding guidelines, and swag.
Laurie Frasier and I, in collaboration and consultation with CMO Ram Kapoor and Creative Director Hulda Nelson from Public Affairs, have been working to prepare for the logo transition. Please contact us directly to help identify all of the places the logo will need to be changed, or if you foresee potential challenges that we can help work through.
In terms of stationery, please use up whatever stock you may have. When you go to order more, the UC Print Storefront will be ready with the Berkeley-aligned templates. For those who use digital letterhead, please email Laurie. The overarching goal is to have as much as possible in place by fall semester, 2020.
Finally, you may be wondering what room there is for tweaking the sizing, spacing, or typographical emphasis in the new logo. There is no room for that, which makes sense for consistency and brand protection. If you’re interested in learning more about how the Office of Business Contracts and Brand Protection protects the Berkeley brand, please visit brand.berkeley.edu/brand-protection.
Thank you for your attention, and please feel free to reach out to me anytime if you have any questions or would like to discuss further.
As ever,
– Alex
P.S. It’s still us. We’re still Berkeley Law. But more visually consistent, cohesive, and instantly recognizable.
Alex A.G. Shapiro
Executive Director, Communications
Berkeley Law
ashapiro@law.berkeley.edu