A good indication of a highly functional team is when, in retrospect, it is impossible to remember whose ideas were whose. The 2014 WSU brand refresh was the result of such a team and I was honored to play a central role. Our work governed the University’s branding through August of 2021. The brand group undertook an across-the-board brand refresh in spite of very little initial institutional support. The result was a set of refined and expanded visual identity assets designed for the utmost flexibility and for every media, from embroidered caps and imprinted pens to stationery, brochures, and the global WSU web presence. My contributions included: 1) reworking the typography in the logo, hand-crafting several ligatures to achieve consistent kerning, 2) creating countless masters for a new set of unit-specific signatures, 3) promoting the adoption of a secondary color palette in tune with WSU’s dark and muted primary colors, 4) developing a global web standard and framework, 5) addressing brand conformance inquiries from the university community, 6) building the brand website, and 7) coding an online logo creation tool.
