Y Design

Last Friday afternoon, Richard Rose, Raleigh Dadamo, Basie Gitlin, and Elizabeth Stauderman joined our office in the Art of the Book Room to judge this year’s Lohmann Prizes. Lian Fumerton-Liu ’15 received first prize for her book “Vertigo,” and Jacqi Lee received second prize for the design of the Fall 2013 Yale Literary Magazine. Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon ’16 and Cindy Hwang ’15 both received honorable mentions: Juan for his letterpress work and Cindy for her WYBC posters.

“Vertigo” stood alone in its attention to material detail and quality of craft. The book, which interprets an essay Lian wrote about Alfred Hitchcook’s movie of the same name, weaves prose, film stills, and production information to create an engrossing and unique reading experience.

This year’s submissions represented a wide variety of design work on campus, from student publications and publicity, to academic work and personal projects. Thank you to everyone who participated. We hope to see your work again next year.

For those interested in viewing this or any previous year’s winning work, all are kept in the permanent collection of the Arts of the Book Collection in the Haas Family Arts Library and are available upon request.

Rebecca and I couldn't help but laugh at the wonderful image she is using in a new invitation design for the Lewis Walpole Library, which made me realize that in LWL’s communications, she uses recurring image treatment to build an individual look for the library.

Located in Farmington, Connecticut, the LWL is the farthest outpost of the Yale University Library system. The library is a research center for 18th-century studies, focusing on British prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, paintings, and decorative arts.

The illustrations—all selected from the LWL’s collections—are often playful, humorous, and always memorable. They are presented in silhouette against a solid-color background. Though this image treatment is simple, it creates a noticeable pattern across LWL communications.

The resulting portfolio is visually cohesive, unique, and appropriate to this library.

Notice that all of the material incorporates the Yale logo and frequently uses the Yale typeface as well. In so doing, the LWL has developed an individual character within the University’s branding guidelines.

Our office occasionally takes on projects to brand major Yale events—like the 50th anniversary of Beinecke Library and President Salovey’s inauguration last fall. Yale’s identity guidelines encourage the development of distinctive logos for such singular and finite events. On the other hand, Yale’s many organizations are asked not to create custom logos in the course of their regular activities. The “no custom logos” constraint can be disconcerting to some, but I would argue that this concern is based on a common misunderstanding about how visual identity is created. A logo (alone) does not a visual identity make.

If we want our publications and communications to be appealing and recognizable to our audiences, there’s much that we can and should bring to bear in the design process beyond consistent use of the Yale logo—all within the University’s identity guidelines.

This week I designed a nametag format and welcome poster for the Long-Service Recognition Celebration, which honors staff members who have served the University for 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and 50 years.

It got me thinking about how I could build a distinctive look—a distinct identity—from a piece of communications as small as a nametag.

Here is the old nametag design:

This is the new design:

The nametag design is based on three guiding formal strategies. 1. The use of large service-year numbers as secondary elements. 2. Left-aligned text blocks, positioned to the right of center. 3. Use of the Yale typeface and the colors Yale Blue and Pantone 645.

When the celebration organizers subsequently requested a design for a poster, I was able to build on the principles that guided the design of the little nametag.

An “identity” begins to emerge. For the sake of this post, I have sketched how this new “identity” could be applied to a wide range of items:

These designs adhere to the Yale identity guidelines, and they all incorporate the Yale logo. However, the specific choice and arrangement of visual elements creates a cohesive “look and feel,” a visual identity for this project.

What’s more, because these designs follow the Yale identity guidelines, they have a “family resemblance” to all other Yale pieces that do so. You know these pieces are from Yale, but you also sense that there’s something special about their message.

Winners of the 2014 Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes have been announced.

This year’s senior prize was awarded to Austin Jung of Saybrook College for his collection on the Esperanto language. Solene Goycochea of Morse College was awarded a senior second prize for her Basque history collection. Sarah Maslin of Trumbull College received a senior honorable mention for her collection titled “Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Violence in Latin America.”

For his collection on modernism in literature, Andrew Koenig of Jonathan Edwards College won the sophomore prize. Sophomore honorable mentions were awarded to Katharine Spooner (Timothy Dwight College) for her collection on the metropolitan history of London with a focus on the London Underground and to Cristóbal Trujillo (Saybrook College) for his foreign literature and philosophy collection.

For more than half a century, student bibliophiles have been receiving prizes for the quality of their book collections, thanks to the generosity of Yale alumnus Adrian Van Sinderen (Class of 1910). In 1957 Mr. Van Sinderen established two prizes, for Yale seniors and sophomores, in order to encourage undergraduates to collect books, build up libraries of their own, and read for pleasure and learning. Current first prize amounts are $1,000 for the senior winner and $750 for the sophomore winner. In 2002 an annual poster competition was added, awarding a $500 prize to the winning designer of the poster used to announce the book collecting competition.

Judges for this year’s competition were William Reese ’77 (Chair), Joseph Agostini ’93, Alec Baum ’14, Elisabeth Fairman, Rebecca Martz, Stephen Parks ’61, E.C. Schroeder, and Sylvia Van Sinderen.