Veselin Nanov examines “The Evolution of Dartmouth’s Visual Identity” in The Dartmouth. I’m pleased that my article remains influential.
UPDATE: Scott Meacham’s Dartmo also remembers my proposal for a coat of arms for Dartmouth.
UPDATE: From the Valley News, a depiction of Dartmouth’s new primary logo, and prescribed typography (with the old combination below):
The new “D-Pine” logo is simple, recognizable, and appropriate to Dartmouth – all good things. Some though have noticed that it bears a remarkable similarity to Stanford’s athletic logo, a pine tree growing in front of a cardinal-colored athletic-font capital “S.” If I have any problem with it, it’s that – it looks like something that might appear on a sports jersey or football helmet, and any university that uses athletic symbols as its primary symbols has misplaced priorities.
Here is a collection of all the seals of the Ivy League:
And here is a collection of its coats of arms:
As you can see, five Ivy League universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Cornell) have seals featuring coats of arms, and it is no big matter to extract those arms, colorize them, and employ them on their own. Columbia and Penn (the two on the lower left) have allegorical seals, and so had to contrive proper coats of arms, which they did very well: Columbia’s crowns refer to its original name of “King’s College,” and Penn features references to the arms of Ben Franklin and William Penn. Dartmouth (lower right) is an anomaly: its seal shows an allegorical scene of Indians being drawn from the woods towards a college building by the light of God – but this is rendered on a shield, with supporters. So when Dartmouth got around to designing a coat of arms in 1944, it just used a simplified version of that shield. As a consequence, Dartmouth’s arms are not really heraldic: they too depict a scene, which has only ever been shown in outline. Furthermore, the subject matter is somewhat unpalatable to our current sensibilities.
Thus my proposal for a heraldic coat of arms for Dartmouth, which would look nice and would make the College the symbolic equal of its peers. Here is Scott’s rendition of it:
Of course, I was about seventy years too late propose such a thing. The meta-message of a coat of arms – essentially, “I am in a formal European tradition extending back to the thirteenth century” – is not really popular these days either.