At the mark of their 125th anniversary, San Diego State rolled out a new primary logo as a part of its rebranding campaign. The logo features the school acronym in a custom font, intended to be representative of the school’s architecture and history.
“Our logo is the most important and recognizable element of our brand’s identity,” SDSU’s webpage for the logo redesign reads. “It is an icon that represents our organization to the world and acts as an identifying and unifying mark.”
SDSU designed the new logo as a unifying trademark of the school, in part to be consistent with the logos of the university’s other campuses. However, students do not seem to agree with that sentiment.
“When I saw it, the first thing I thought was: ‘It’s awful. I don’t like it at all,’” junior marketing major Logan Goverman said.
As a transfer student, Goverman was excited about embarking on his journey at SDSU, part of which was sporting the school logo as an emblem of community and belonging. The redesigned logo, according to Goverman, is not the symbol of unity that was promised. While much detail was put into the custom font, the logo itself did not evoke a sense of pride for him.
“As a marketing major, my professors teach that you could go into so much detail [with a design] and have the best reasoning,” Goverman said. “But it doesn’t matter at the end of the day, because the audience’s perception is the most important.”
Freshman pre-liberal studies major Alondra Chula Fernandez shares a similar opinion of disappointment with Goverman, saying when it comes to the new logo, perception is reality.
“I think that a logo should represent what a school is – the identity of a school,” Chula Fernandez said. “When I saw the new logo, I thought: ‘Is this it? Is this who we are? It’s just letters.’”
While disappointed with the new logo, both Chula Fernandez and Goverman agreed the school’s brand needed a refresh. Both students believe SDSU could have taken steps to mitigate the strikingly negative student response to the new design and, perhaps, create a better one.
“They could have done more to include everyone,” Chula Fernandez said. “But they kind of took their own route to change the logo, rather than taking the necessary step of including us.”
Goverman proposed that SDSU could have sent out a school-wide email “canvassing the student body” as they do for many other proposals and announcements. He also reflected that the importance of student feedback should have been considered by university administration.
“I’m a filmmaker, and I’ve worked with many groups and organizations. At the end of the day, you could think that your project is the best thing in the world, but then you have to show it to people and hear what they say,” Goverman said.
While SDSU has placed many resources into launching the redesign of their logo, students have been resistant to adopting the new look. Chula Fernandez described the new logo as one that prioritizes “minimalism” over “creativity,” which she believes may not be what students are looking for in an emblem meant to represent and unify them.
“I have not heard one person speak positively of the new logo,” Goverman said. “And I think that if they had just surveyed the student body they would have had a different outcome. And it exposes a bigger problem at State; I don’t think they [SDSU administration] are in touch with the student body. They don’t talk to us to figure out what we like as their students.”
