Brand architecture refers to the hierarchy of sub-brands within a single organization and helps determine how various departments and units express and leverage their affiliation with the university. It helps us speak in one voice, appear consistent and enhance recollection, avoid confusion, and banish visual and cognitive clutter for our audiences. In fact, it is possible to think of a brand and brand architecture as solely existing to make things easier for people to recognize, understand and consume a product or service.
Leveraging university and college brand reputation
The Cornell University name and brand are highly recognizable in the higher education sector, given its over 150 years history, its “any person, any study” mission, and the university’s contribution to scholarly fields and the common good. These are just some of the reasons why it’s important to reflect the Cornell brand in everything we do and to follow the university guidelines. Similarly, the College of Arts & Sciences is one of the oldest colleges at Cornell, and has built a reputation and system that helps us all put our best foot forward.
Other benefits of staying on brand are
- saving time by taking out the guesswork and making your design decisions easier with our guides and templates
- ensuring that your materials are consistent over time, which fuels recognition and trust
- using design and marketing materials that are effective and on brand
The Cornell brand
For Cornell general brand guidance please consult https://brand.cornell.edu.
The Arts and Sciences brand
The way we communicate with our audience, whether students, faculty or community partners, is an expression of our unique mission, culture and values. So before we communicate with our audiences, let’s take a moment to think about the big picture of the College of Arts & Sciences and our mission.
The College of Arts & Sciences is reimagining the liberal arts model of education. Our diverse and expansive academic community embraces collaboration, active and experiential learning models and a commitment to research and scholarly excellence.
Our research activities and academic programs are remarkably broad, but they share one characteristic: all are curiosity-driven. Exploring the unknown is central to our mission to be the nexus of discovery & impact.
With an understanding of our remarkable strengths and our greatest opportunities for impact, the College of Arts & Sciences remains focused on four essential priorities.
They are:
- Research and scholarly excellence
- Academic innovation and student experience
- Faculty renewal and support
- Public engagement, both locally and globally
The College of Arts & Sciences' departments and academic programs are the engines that drive our research and scholarly excellence. Our faculty lead these departments and programs, defining myriad academic pathways available to students and building collaborative research communities across the humanities, the social sciences, and natural sciences. These departments are foundational to Cornell University's status as a world-class research university.
But a diverse student body and a breadth of academic pathways is not enough – all students also need to feel valued, respected, heard, intellectually challenged and encouraged to grow once they arrive at Cornell. This requires a commitment to an equitable and just institution that encompasses our entire community of students, faculty and staff.
Given the identity and mission of the college, we communicators use branding to share this identity and mission with audiences in many ways, from websites to letterhead to department events.
The Arts and Sciences lockup
We often refer to it as the A&S logo, but it is really a lockup between the Cornell University seal and the Arts & Sciences wordmark.
A wordmark is the typographical treatment of the name of the college, department, units and so on. A wordmark can be a logo on its own or paired with a brand mark or symbol. In Arts & Sciences, all wordmarks are set in the Gibson typeface, including that of the college itself.
The A&S lockup appears only once on a communications piece.
Versions of the logo for different backgrounds
Select the appropriate A&S lockup version (reverse, full color, one color, or inverse) to ensure sufficient contrast and legibility against its background.
Logo spacing
The A&S lockup needs space surrounding it to ensure a clean design. The clearspace is the specific amount of space around the lockup, which ensures visibility and impact.
Text, headlines, photographs, or illustrations should never be closer to the lockup than 1/2 the diameter of the seal.
Keep other visual elements in your design away from this area. The clearspace is equal on all sides.
Download A&S lock-up [insert link to download files]
Minimum size
The Cornell seal cannot be smaller than 0.75 inches in a print design.
The height of the capital letters in any wordmark text used to brand a department or program must be at least 0.21 inches.
When the program or department logo appears near the A&S logo, the text must be of equal size (same cap height) and on the same baseline.
No modifications
DON’T modify the Cornell or Arts & Sciences logos and lockup in any way or create new versions.