Working With Wellesley College

The new Wellesley logo

Over the last several months we’ve been working with the prestigious Wellesley College on redesigning its visual identity. With the goals of extending the college’s intellectual community outward and solidifying Wellesley’s place and reputation in the broader world, our work is focused on clarifying the school’s organizational architecture and bringing harmony and cohesion to the communications of its various departments. In so doing, we hope to create efficiencies that will have the added benefit of saving the school money.

We started with the fact that Wellesley is known for cultivating women who will be leaders in the world. To reflect this, BaseLab designed a custom monogram W that conveys upward growth and serves as a platform for the college name. In certain contexts, this iconic, custom W also functions on its own, as a monogram.

Two versions of the logotype

The custom-drawn monogram

Because “Wellesley Blue” has previously included several different blues, we assigned the school color a Pantone number so it could be applied consistently by the college’s many various departments. Offset by the addition of a cream and black, Wellesley’s traditional color is given the ability to exist in different and differentiating contexts throughout college communications, while retaining its historical significance. We’ve also put together a secondary color palette to strengthen, support, and complement the Wellesley Blue, and give it greater versatility in the long term. Each of the 14 secondary colors in its own way emphasizes and enhances the character of the Wellesley Blue.

The logo in Wellesley Blue and supporting colors

To convey the rich heritage of Wellesley, we use serif typeface Garamond Pro, which is versatile and easy to read in any size and weight.

Garamond Pro, classic with options

We add sans serif font Swiss 721 to bring a contemporary edge, and complement the classic feel of serif Garamond Pro. Swiss 721 exists in several weights and variations, enabling a wide range of expression.

The sans serif Swiss 721 offsets the classic logotype with a versatile contemporary feel

While we shot the campus last year with Tierney Gearon, our art direction will be followed locally by the college. Photography will capture all aspects of the Wellesley experience—from teachers and students to academic and social life, on campus and beyond—and present Wellesley women engaged in the world, in varying stages of personal growth.

With the logo, monogram, colors, typography, and art direction in place, a distinctive grid system brings it all together with a recognizable graphic gesture. College information can be set as header and/or footer, and is centered in relation to itself. To avoid conflicting with imagery, this “centered” axis can slide left or right for greater flexibility in design. This grid system can also be scaled down, without maintaining the same format or proportions, and serve as an identifying insert that can be placed freely over imagery. This miniature grid box corrals information into a compact, distinctive box that can be placed according to the content of the imagery it accompanies. In this way both the image and the written content can be emphasized.