Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) was seeking a brand evolution, a shift that would better reflect its prestigious history and forward-looking ambitions.
A process that feels like RPI
The brand came to life through sketches and coded applications, through trial and error, and by continuing to ask ourselves: Why create a fixed system? RPI wanted a brand that would properly express their trajectory as a robust, holistic community focused on the generation and discovery of new knowledge, processes, and products. To that end, why not invite the community to keep exploring and inventing?
Through workshops, surveys, and open calls, students, faculty, staff, alumni, and board members contributed their points of view to form a totally ownable design language that blends STEM and creativity; one that looks like nothing else but feels unmistakably RPI.
I want to express appreciation for how you have really embodied the language, ideas, and concepts of RPI...into this work.
May Lee Chief Strategy Officer
With a community eager to step up and keep exploring and pushing the brand forward, we established the bar beneath the RPI wordmark as the crux of this new dynamic system. It became an open part of the identity that people could experiment with, embedding it with their own fresh meaning and vision. As a pattern, it can break free from the logo and take any shape. It can be masked in a circle or distorted with Perin noise generated from a Fibonacci sequence, and altogether it forms a totally ownable design language that blends STEM and creativity.
RPI has been sans-serif-forward since the 1800s, long before it was on trend. An engineered sans typeface proved more authentic to RPI's 200-year history than the classical serif typefaces commonly favored throughout academia. While maintaining the prominent presence of RPI's iconic red, a secondary color palette was pulled from the original 1904 seal drawing to add flexibility and another subtle layer of RPI heritage.
A system built to last for a brand designed to grow
With longevity in mind, we established a forward-looking foundation of durable brand management repositories, guidelines, and tools that invite participation, including a generative logo app. The user isn't just the end user browsing the website. It's every person at RPI who picks up the brand and makes something with it.
If anyone can iterate, it's an RPI student working across disciplines to find new edges of science, math, and creativity. Their enthusiasm and prolific output when it came to the bar was just the first step in the new RPI identity. This is collaboration in practice: a brand RPI will keep building every time they reach for it, ready to remix.
