Last academic year, nearly 2,000 UC Riverside stakeholders contributed toward the Brand Messaging Initiative, which assessed the university’s reputation among our core audiences and led to the development of a new suite of messaging assets to enhance the telling of the university’s story. These assets are available on the UC Riverside Brand website and will continue to influence the university’s marketing and communications in the years to come.
The next phase of this work involves making revisions to UCR’s brand visual identity. The Visual Identity Initiative, which is currently underway, will result in an assessment and update to the university primary visual assets, including logos, wordmarks, fonts, and graphic design guidelines.
The last time the university’s visual identity was assessed and updated was 2006, before mobile platforms, digital applications, social media, and online video proliferated. As a result our current visual identity functions well for print and desktop platforms, but ineffectively everywhere else.
This process will also result in adjustments to the UCR Athletics identity, which will ensure that the institutional and athletics identities are complementary – which is often not the case at other universities.
More than 300 students, faculty, staff, alumni and other stakeholders have already participated in focus groups or question-and-answer sessions about the Visual Identity Initiative. Extensive time and care will be allocated toward the development of campus design resources, templates, and tools that will simplify implementation of the new visual identity, once established.
The scale of anticipated change will be moderate. The university’s primary colors will remain blue and gold (although the shades might change), our nickname will continue to be the Highlanders, and we’ll continue to have a bear mascot named Scotty. The priority of the initiative will be on a UCR visual brand identity that works effectively across applications including web, mobile, print, social, apparel, signage, products, video, and more.
We will continue to update the campus community, and engage primary stakeholders throughout the Visual Identity Initiative.
Anyone looking for current UCR logos, monograms, fonts, and other graphic resources may access and download them on the UCR brand website.
In addition, on the site you may access other resources such as email signatures, PowerPoint templates, summaries of campus communications channels, digital wallpaper, video footage, and photography assets.