Guidelines
In close collaboration with various campus groups, our team helps to define, maintain, and update certain guidelines and standards related to the College’s identity.
If you're thinking of creating your own logo for a program or group, please don't! More about that here.
We welcome questions, comments, and suggestions and encourage the College community to refer to the Bowdoin Editorial Style Guidelines and other resources below.
Website and Social Media Resources
You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) create your own logos.
Why not?
While it can be fun to create your own logo—and there are many tools available or under development that make it easy to do so—these additional logos or graphic elements are usually unnecessary and can be counterproductive.
But I want people to notice. Why does my project have to be linked graphically to Bowdoin?
Bowdoin is a powerful brand. Everything here benefits from its association and identification with the College, and the proliferation of individual marks for different programs, policies, or products within the College dilutes that Bowdoin brand, making it less effective. Standalone individual marks can also confuse audiences about whether the program is associated with the College.
I think my situation is different.
It may be, but please don’t spend time or resources creating a design or a mockup—just talk with us about your ideas and needs. We understand the desire to communicate about and build excitement for new initiatives, groups, or programs, and we want to help by offering professional design services for printed and digital materials that enhance visibility and functionality without diluting Bowdoin’s graphic identity program or confusing audiences.
How do you do that?
In general, our approach is to work within the College’s well-established brand standards and graphic identity program to create a non-logo approach in the form of a type treatment (variations in the type itself, as opposed to adding a mark or visual element to type), a “lock-up” (pairing words with an existing Bowdoin mark), and/or a detailed plan for communication and promotion.
How can I get some help?
Give us a call or come see us to find out how we can help you achieve your communication and marketing goals.