I’m not sure what the longterm implications of this innovation will be. Readability might actually suffer, since many of the print fonts do not perform particularly well in on-line environments. Will we someday look back nostalgically at the clarity and readability of Georgia and Verdana?

One thing that is clear is that your potential for projecting a brand personality on the Web has just expanded exponentially. The chances are now quite good that whatever fonts are stipulated in your graphic standards manual can be used throughout your website as well as in print.

Working with my talented colleagues at Door No. 2, we just launched a college website that takes advantage of Typekit’s capabilities. The website for DePauw University uses the same two typefaces – Adobe Caslon and Futura – that are used throughout the college’s print program. If you haven’t explored the potential offered by Typekit, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes poking around the site. You will find the same style sheets, employing, for example, the rather stylized Caslon Italic, operating throughout the site (save the athletics pages). This alters the user experience. To me, the site feels a bit less utilitarian and a bit more pleasurable. It certainly has a different impact than a site with more traditional style sheets.

As I wrote in my last post, the emergence of Typekit makes it pressing to review one’s identity manual to evaluate the applicability of your current typefaces to the Web. From here on out, graphic standard systems will need to take the Web side of the house seriously. We now have the potential to employ the same fonts in both Web and print. It’s up to the university or school communications teams to review the fonts that are currently being used, and retain or replace them. The convergence of Web and print technologies offers enormous potential for expanding the reach of one’s brand image. It’s up to institutions to take advantage of this great potential.

So the question arises – how long is one of these things good for? Or alternatively, if I produced an identity system a while ago, does it need to be refreshed or can I just stick with it?

The answer is you should refresh it. If you produced an identity system more than five years ago, you should undertake a review of the system and consider updating it to fit evolving design tools and sensibilities.

What I am not talking about here is changing your logo. That’s not a refresh. That’s a new identity system. You only want to do that when the previous work was inadequate or inconsistent with your current strategic goals.

But even if you think your identity system is working well and you like your logo and your colors, it’s worth updating it to extend its useful life.

The main catalyst for such a review are dramatic developments over the past few years in font design and capabilities. The greatest of these is the ability, through services such as Typekit, to employ a wide range of fonts on the Web. Five or six years ago this capability did not exist, and most designers spec’ed Verdana, Georgia, Arial or similar fonts for Web applications. Today, the world of print typefaces has opened up for Web application. That doesn’t mean that all of these fonts are appropriate for the Web. But it does mean that it’s worth reviewing your system to see whether there are new ways to build a stronger shared identity between your print and Web communications.

There have also been enormous strides in font design over the past few years that give designers many new tools for excellence in design. Adobe, among others, has produced new font families that support corporate branding goals much more comprehensively with both serif’ed and sans-serif’ed communciations. An institution should not make a change simply for novelty’s sake. Consistency of appearance is what a good identity system is all about. But if you are operating with a set of fonts that a communications firm gave you several years ago, the chances are good that there are new fonts that might give your institution a better tool kit.

While you’re undertaking this review, it’s worth looking at the new colors that Pantone has released to see whether any of those can support your color system.

None of this is radical, or indeed, high priority work. I worry, therefore, that most institutions won’t go to the trouble However, if you want to keep your communications professional and effective, it’s worth reviewing and  updating your identity system from time to time – not to alter the design sensibility or intention, but to take advantage of new resources and the ways that design is evolving.

For me, that means I’m walking clients through multiple redesigns of the covers of their new viewbooks.

My firm produces viewbooks. We’ve been doing so for well over a decade. We are fairly confident that we can work successfully in this longest of long-forms of graphic design. And our clients are happy. But still there is always the tussle over the viewbook cover. The insides are fine. We change a picture here, alter a quote there. Make sure the facts in the fact-sheet will pass muster. Then we spend two or three weeks dragging the cover through revision after revision after revision.

I know why viewbook covers are so problematic. For me, the cover is a wrapper. It needs to set the right tone and induce the recipient turn the page. I think the best viewbook cover that was ever produced was that for the Yale viewbook of the 1990s which was simply a field of blue with the word “Yale” knocked out in white.

The client wants the cover to convey all the meaning and substance of an institution –  to convey the message that will close the sale with a prospect. And the client is anxious. Other people at the institution are going to be looking at the cover. That’s not an anxiety that I share at all. I’m focused on whether the viewbook will work with its intended audience. That’s who we are designing it for.

My goal during those two or three weeks of cover revisions is to make sure that we don’t end up with something weaker than what we started with. That is no small challenge, since graphic design and the cover’s function as a wrapper are not uppermost in the client’s mind. It usually turns out fine. I always offer to test the cover in focus groups in the fall and prepare a new one for the following year if the results are not positive. So far, no one has taken me up on the offer. The academic year starts. Anxiety about the viewbook cover recedes. We move onto our next project.

Why haven’t independent schools figured out what most everybody else has – that good design, high quality writing, and excellent photography are effective without over-the-top production.

One reason schools have not is the herd mentality of private school administrators. These folks tend to be risk adverse and not particularly expert in communications. Both combine to result in a tendency to ape the elaborate practices of the school down the road.

But I suspect there is a deeper reason as well – this is the price-point. In most large markets, the lifeblood of successful independent schools is wealthy families. Indeed, in many of the most successful areas,the public schools are reasonably good, and the private-school market consists of affluent families who will stop at nothing to give their children every advantage in the high stakes American education game.  The viewbooks reinforce the sense of outsized privilege that has come to mark this sector.

The irony – it goes without saying – is that the leadership of the independent school movement would deny just this sort of elitism as a goal. In their communications they strive to convey egalitarianism. If schools want to close the gap between their values and the image they convey with their overwrought viewbooks, they should rewrite their budgets – cut back on the production qualities of their viewbooks and direct  resources to the quality of the in-house staff responsible for marketing and communications. There is no solution to the clunky, overwrought independent school viewbooks other than more intelligent, professional in-house communications savvy.

One of the big trends I’m spotting is the rise of personalized printing. Digital printing makes it possible to produce a full-color brochure that looks like it was off-set printed, but, amazingly, contains information personalized to the recipient. American University shouts from a large red postcard, “DAVID, YOU WANT TO KNOW PHILOSOPHY? KNOW AU.” I assume they are taking this tack because my son checked the box for philosophy as an area of interest on the PSAT. (What this has to do with AU’s “wonk” positioning is unclear, but I guess their desire to recruit my son overrides brand consistency.)

One of the cheesiest things my son’s received is an oversized, full-color brochure from Haverford College. It shows a long line of begowned Haverford students in procession on the day of their college graduation. A circle is drawn around one of the more distant figures in the procession and it is labeled ”David Neustadt, Class of 2016.” So here is my son in a graduation processional four years in the future having had, one assumes, a happy experience at Haverford. Does this sort of thing work? It’s really cheesy, hokey. It’s nothing like the stylistics my son consumes in his life – the t-shirts he wears or the music he listens to. It feels like something that the most un-hip person on the planet thought would appeal to teenagers.

I have the same question I’ve had for the longest time about college admissions marketing. Does it matter that is so shallow and unsophisticated? Haverford is a school that I admire. At least I think I do. I am vaguely aware of what I believe to be a serious, academic program and a potentially transformative educational experience. This brochure lacks the sophistication of a Comcast mailer. From the consumer’s vantage point, it is a heck of a lot easier to ignore this sort of thing than to buy into it; the latter course would make you feel slightly cheap and degraded. No wonder colleges are having a harder and harder time communicating with their prospects.

Those on the outside rarely appreciate the identity system that goes hand in hand with the logo. The system is the accompanying guidelines on colors, fonts, stationery design, application of the logo, etc. Usually the identity system is explained in a graphic standards manual. (You can see an example of graphic standards manual we developed for Tufts University here).

Sometimes, if the offices around your campus are hungry for a new design, the minute you announce your logo, they will ask for the electronic file and want to start stamping it willy-nilly on whatever they are producing. They will be a little less happy when you send over a manual that tells them that they are only to apply the logo in strictly regulated ways and that they must use certain fonts and colors.

Although the identity system is the least appreciated part of logo work, it is as important to successful implementation of a new identity as the logo itself. Folks not involved with the day-to-day issues of design have no idea how much thought and organization go into production of a consistent, memorable brand identity.

For the sake of that identity system, it is essential that when you begin a logo development process, you conduct a comprehensive communications audit to catalog the complete range of communications associated with your institution – both on the web and in print. The audit needs to be as thorough as possible, including, for example, brochures and letters sent out by your athletics department, parent’s group, and alumni association. Posters developed by student clubs. Web sites developed by departments and centers. One of the most important areas to document are collaborations between parts of your institution and separate corporate or non-profit entities, for example a collaboration between a medical school and one of its hospitals in its teaching system.

This audit not only needs to account for the complete range of current communication but also look to the future. The goal for an effective identity system is that it will be in place for quite a long time, since the identity grows in effectiveness the more it is repeated. If there is a new center or school envisioned in the next five or ten years, it is wise to take this into account when developing the identity system. Is there a new bio-tech research park in the works? Is there a change of location afoot? Is there a capital campaign in the near future? All of these factors should be taken into account if possible in developing the system.

Normally it is the role of the design team heading up the logo development process to conduct this audit. You can help that team by beginning to assemble information. The most important thing for the in-house team managing the process to do is to insure that all important areas of communication are vetted as part of the audit process. The outside team will have no way of knowing about the many possible applications of the identity system. The in-house team need to direct the designers to critical applications.

The audit is the essential starting point for a logo development process. Don’t get underway without it.

We start here – you have commissioned a new logo because you find something lacking in the current one. It is out of date, difficult to use, or lacks design quality that you believe accurately reflect the quality of your institution. Sometimes there has been a lack of discipline surrounding application of the current logo system. Competing, non-conforming logos dot the campus. In commissioning a logo, you are asking a graphic designer to help you achieve your goals. You are asking for a piece of design that is timeless, fresh, lively, distinctive, and appropriate. You are also asking for outside assistance in creating a culture where people use a logo in consistent ways so that you can build positive brand recognition.

Understand at the outset that you will be asking many people within your institution to judge a work of design in a way for which they are not equipped by training or expertise. Logos are particularly difficult to design because one is working with a minimal palette to meet many exacting criteria. That is why logos are produced by designers with experience in this particular field. They are the kind of people who spend their lives focusing on visual minutiae that most of us take for granted. Administrators at an institution do not possess this graphical point of view yet they often believe it is valid to interject their own judgement when it comes to the quality of a logo.

The important way to combat this is to maintain an orderly and structured process for design review. The graphic designer will show you his or her proposed solution(s) and some explanation of how he or she arrived at that recommendation. It is critical to a successful logo development process that all the people who could down the road veto the design be present for this presentation. This might be a board member, the institution’s Headmaster or President, or a Vice President on the other side of campus. If down the road they are going to have input into the design of the logo, they need to be present for the graphic designer’s explanation. And you need to think seriously about this issue. You might think you’ve included everyone with the ability to veto a logo only to discover later someone you’ve overlooked. If this occurs, the designer is well within his rights to complain about how you have managed the process.

You will be working collaboratively with the designer. Your most important role is provide feedback as to whether you feel the design accurately reflects the image of the institution and where the institution wants to go. Then you need to thoroughly vet the design to make sure it supports the full range of required applications – whether you need special versions for institutional centers, whether the colors are easily produced in a wide range of media, etc. If you play your role well and if the designer has talent and the ability to explain the reasons for his or her design solution, the process can go smoothly. You will enjoy the considerable benefits that come from a high quality piece of design at the center of your institution.

In my next blog post, I’ll focus on the importance of a communications audit prior to beginning the design process.

The aesthetics of school, college, and university websites are changing in positive ways. There is much more emphasis on clarity, ease of navigation, and simplicity. The bells and whistles, the flash animations, that we all paid so much attention to just a few years ago, are diminishing in importance.

One of my favorite recent sites, that of the Walker School in Atlanta, Georgia (designed by Silverpoint), has an elaborate homepage feature – a set of still images that open into short video clips at the click of the mouse. It is elegant and impressive. I’m sure that the Walker School administration is rightfully proud of it. Truth be told, however, the site would be just about as good without the elaborate video feature. The strength of the site is its clear design and navigation and the purpose-written text that runs throughout. In this day, one can’t imagine a family making as deliberate a decision as where to send their child to school based on a flashy feature. But they will be persuaded by helpful information thoughtfully and professionally presented.

One feature that will not go away from educational websites, especially not for colleges and universities, is the virtual tour. When you conduct research among high school students, they always mention the virtual tour. When they go to an institution’s website, what are they looking for? Among the top things is what the institution looks like.

If anything virtual tours are becoming more not less important. We all know how important campus visits are to the admissions process. Once a student has visited a campus, they are not going to care about a virtual tour on the school website. But two groups of growing importance to most universities are less likely to be visiting campus – the less affluent and students from overseas. We all know the challenges that schools face bringing students from modest backgrounds to campus. Most international students apply and enroll at American institutions without setting foot on the campus. For these two groups, as well as for the rank and file of applicants before they visit campus, the virtual tour is crucial.

That’s why I’m so excited about the virtual tour recently launched by Dickinson College. It is not particularly elaborate. Unlike more traditional tours, it is built on four themes that flow from the institution’s brand strategy. So it doesn’t just show students what the campus looks like, it uses the opportunity of the virtual tour to reenforce key institutional themes.

What is so exciting about this tour is that it was built on such a user-friendly content management system that the staff in the communications office was able to write and load all of the content with little effort and no technical expertise. If you spend a few minutes with the tour, you will see how rich in content it is. There are so many images and so much text that it’s unlikely a visitor will take in all of it. And the CMS is so easy to work with that the images and text can be changed, replaced, and updated as desired. The design is simple and effective enough that it maintains the all important brand image while individual photos and text nuggets can constantly change.

The price of the site was quite reasonable. And note – it doesn’t really have any bells and whistles. All it has is an intuitive and simple interface, a good concept, and clear design.

Every college and university should have a virtual tour like this. Not necessarily these particular themes. The themes and structure are a product of the brand strategy that is specific to Dickinson College. But something that is so straightforward, economical, engaging and easy to build and maintain. I’m betting on a two point jump in applications next year at Dickinson based on the virtual tour alone.  I know without question that this will be a boon to their international recruitment. In the meantime, it sure looks like the folks at Dickinson are having fun with their virtual tour. I’m proud to have played a supporting role in its development.

As always, this pronouncement is made as if it is a rare and precious truth. This university official has hit on a brilliant concept: only if you present your institution by way of stories, will it be successful.

Maybe I’ve been doing this too long and I shouldn’t be so jaded, but what can I do? I’ve been hearing the same line about stories for fifteen years now – at conferences, workshops, and client and prospect meetings. It may be true but it’s certainly not rare. Everyone tries to tell their story by means of “stories.” Rather than being exceptional, this is the default approach to higher ed marketing. It is not a closely guarded secret, nor unfortunately, is it an approach that by itself will differentiate an institution.

Why don’t stories work? If you work at an institution and are immersed in the institutional culture, you know that there are some student stories that exemplify your institution. You know that student A coming from background B and having experiences C,D, and E with the help of faculty F, G, and H has gone on to do I, which is exactly what your institution is all about.

The problem is that a high school student looking at your institution doesn’t understand your culture and is not able to see your story as representative of something distinctive. To a high school student, this is just another story, of which there are far too many in college promotional materials. So big deal, you’ve got a successful student. How is the prospect supposed to connect that story to his own experience? He just sees it as a story of a successful student. Of course, he says, colleges profile successful students in their promotional materials. They’re not fools. But high schoolers don’t trust college marketing materials – they view them as self-promotional and one-sided. Stories do nothing per se to break through this skepticism.

Here’s the truth that I would have liked to say when I was talking with this university marketer but instead bit my tongue. Of course you’ll use stories (du-uh). We in educational promotion have a limited set of tools to use in assembling our materials and student profiles are one of them. There is nothing mind-shattering about that. But telling stories or not has nothing to do with success or failure. As a tool they are no better or worse than others. It all depends on how you use them.

What university marketing people sometimes miss is that because your culture is not known to prospects outside the institution you need to go through a creative translation process. You need to go through a challenging and difficult process of developing an aesthetic direction using words, images, tone, and interactivity that translate your culture into something that can be desired by someone who does not understand it. If you tell a good story, but use lame or conventional taglines and images for conveying it, it will have no power. The results of this aesthetic translation process are much more important than the particular tools you use – be they stories, or a single, running third-person voice, or testimonials, or whatever. There is no single formula whereby one tool, say stories, is better than another. It all depends on the distinctive image that you develop to convey your message. Developing this image is hard work, but all effective marketing depends on it. Once we’ve got the image, it’s easy enough to figure out the place of stories in it and make them work for the benefit of the institution. So don’t tell me about stories. If you want to arouse my interest, tell me about your positioning and what your creative strategy is for building your image in the outside world. That’s a story that will get me excited.

The requirements for a genuinely excellent logo are great: it needs to be adaptable to a variety of contexts while making a clear and unambiguous statement. It needs to be fresh without seeming trendy or ephemeral. It needs to serve an organization for a long time. Plus, it needs to reference stylistically the brand strategy.

Given all of those requirements, particularly the need for a logo to be built on strategy, it is enough to ask a shop to come up with a single effective logo. What I tell my clients is that I will share with them stages in the design process and preliminary sketches or attempts. But I will not show them several design choices. If the single design that I end up proposing is unsatisfactory, I will go back and start again with a clean slate. Then I will come back with another single proposed design.

The main reason you never show multiple designs for a logo is that invariably the quality of the design solution will be judged by people who don’t have a great deal of experience doing so. New logos produce anxiety. Often a lot of anxiety. If you show multiple treatments to a committee you risk building on that anxiety. One person will like one design. Another will like the other. There will be talk about some compromise treatment. And then, your logo process will be seriously derailed.

One of the unfortunate realities of logo design is that it is extraordinarily precise. Generally a logo cannot suffer watering down or compromise without losing what it is all about. Other kinds of design are much more forgiving. That is why, if you want a logo that will truly serve your institutional needs, you don’t require that you see alternate designs.