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RECENT ENTRIES
BLOG ROLL
Seal of approval
Vincent Yu, '14, designs a new look for the University of Chicago’s old logo, just for kicks.
Vincent Yu, ‘14, hasn’t even started classes yet, but why would that prevent the incoming first-year from getting a head start on the kind of critical thinking he’s excited to partake in at the U of C? A self-taught graphic designer, Yu decided at the beginning of August to update the look of the University seal for a more modern audience, posting his slick new design on his blog, idionsyncratic reminiscences. The San Jose native took a minute for a phone interview with UChiBLOGo to discuss the what brought the beaming bird about.
What made you want to come to the University of Chicago?
The overwhelming intellectualism of the University, and also the art and culture of the city—an authentic, original American city.
What made you want to redesign the University seal?
I wanted UChicago apparel, but when I was looking through sweatshirts I didn’t like what I saw. Most people would get the normal logo and get it on a custom sweater…. It’s a pretty awesome logo in itself—it’s a pretty complex logo for a University seal—but as I was looking at it, it was more complex and, not retro, more classic than would probably be necessary for a sweatshirt in the contemporary world of design…. I wanted to design a seal that didn’t have as Byzantine a look, as complex a look as the original logo has.
What were you going for?
I guess you can say it was a hybrid of the Twitter logo and what I thought was UChicago, the original seal. I wanted something that was sort of a phoenix and had the remnants of the original logo, but was as accessible as the Twitter logo.
So what’s going on in the new seal?
It does have sort of the feather designs. You can see the patterns going on in the bird’s wing, but the shape looks a lot more symmetrical than the original logo was, in terms of the bird’s wings.
Its eyes look kind of vacant. Why’s that?
[The Twitter logo] is just a white oval, so I guess it was just pirated from that. I guess the biggest reason was I wanted it to be contrasted from the original Chicago seal—you can tell it was hand-ink done, or stencil done. I was using the computer, which makes it much more difficult to create intricate designs…. [The design] also makes it more accessible, in terms of making it a modern, cartoonish image.
And it looks like the font’s been updated too.
The font is just Avant Garde; I guess the style is condensed too. The business school loves to use Helvetica condensed…. I wanted to adapt that, but I didn’t want to be as bold as the Chicago Booth type face…it’s great for a school like Booth—it’s a brand name that’s recognizable—but here I wanted the focus to be on the image.
How’d you get to be so artistic?
My parents originally tried to enroll me in art classes when I was in second grade, like, paint-the-vase kind of classes…the traditional approach to art. I really didn’t like it, I really didn’t like the idea of art for the majority of my life, from like 4 to 14. And then entering high school, I was very interested in journalism but I didn’t want to do newspapers…there was no permanence in terms of writing; what I wrote wouldn’t really matter in the next month or the next week.
Why did journalism appeal to you?
I wanted to do something more concrete, and I know yearbook doesn’t sound like journalism, but I made it my goal to make it more journalistic…I got to doing that. Obviously I didn’t lose my love towards journalism, I still love to report on the interesting stuff…. I sort of just transitioned from layout to actual illustrations, and I guess that’s how I sort of got into it.
Asher Klein, '11
August 30, 2010
