I have yet to meet a single person who says they like UCL’s latest rebranding. Not one.
Particular bones of contention include ‘unreadable bubble font’, ‘garish purple’, and, of course, that the designers had a badly mistaken impression that the columns of the Portico vary in width.
Clearly, the fact that this latter design feature represents “the way light falls across the portico’s columns throughout the day” was lost in translation.
Underlying all of these arguably more superficial critiques, however, is a sense that this new logo doesn’t look like the logo of a university. Where Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh have their ancient coats of arms, UCL has, well, bubble font.
It is difficult to disagree completely with these complaints, but it is worth understanding the motivations behind what we’re stuck with.
Firstly, there is no getting around the fact that UCL must have a logo. The UCL coat of arms is a uniquely ugly item, and I suspect that is why it hasn’t been used much outside of a varsity context. Where Oxbridge’s PR teams were blessed with lovely pieces of heraldry, UCL’s were not. Thus, something else had to be fashioned.
The first instance of there being a UCL logo (in the modern sense) came about, as far as I can tell, when UCL clawed back its independence from the University of London in 1977.
It took the form of the letters ‘UCL’ inscribed beneath an outline of the Portico, not unlike the logo of a student society that exists for a year and then disappears into the ether, never to be resurrected. Suffice to say, it wasn’t very good. This was followed by a rebrand in 2005 which gave us the previous logo: truncated bottom and all.
Even my continual reference to ‘UCL’ and not ‘University College London’ is a result of the conscious efforts of public relations pointy-heads.
Prior to the 2005 rebrand, ‘University College London’ was the preferred moniker; ‘UCL’ was adopted because of a perceived confusion as to whether we were a university or a college, particularly amongst prospective American (i.e. rich) students. Sound familiar?
It’s worth dwelling for a moment on the reaction to that rebrand.
Whilst it’s hard to tell what most students thought of it, the publicised reaction was fairly brutal; one venerable UCL publication described the reaction as a “universal fanfare of apathy and disdain”, calling the new ‘London’s Global University’ slogan “arguably meaningless and vapid”.
The rebrand itself was overshadowed by attempts to shrink a £7 million deficit through staff cuts. The fact that the new logo omitted the lower portion of the letters ‘UCL’ attracted particular disdain.
This inspired a frankly brilliant protest poster showing the bottom of the letters ‘UCL’ being cut off with scissors, captioned ‘resist the cuts’. The cuts themselves were sold as a remedy to the very problem the rebrand was attempting to solve: a shortage of money. It was felt that a refreshed brand would turn the struggling ‘University College London’ into the universally coveted ‘UCL’, complete with lucrative international fees and research grants.
Other universities in the UK were also rebranding around this time, with King’s College London adopting its current logo over thirty years ago. Despite having a rather handsome coat of arms (sorry UCL), they opted for a modernised brand image. They even went for a serif font, which arguably conveys a little more prestige than bubble font. However, this logo too has been subject to criticisms, such as that it looks like it was “designed on Microsoft Word”, and other screeds.
I suppose my point is this: can you, honestly, imagine a rebrand you would have been satisfied with?
When it comes to institutions that mean so much to so many people, it is hard, sometimes impossible, to please anyone. This is illustrated by the fierce backlash to the 2005 logo many are now defending as not needing to be changed. But even that logo, so hated at the time, might have achieved what it set out to.
UCL has gone from being ranked 28th in the world in 2005, to 9th in 2026. Rankings are, of course, flawed measures, but they do go some way in illustrating the international prestige we now enjoy. I don’t mean to imply that a shiny new logo was entirely responsible for this, but it was one part of a conscious effort to raise our image.
It’s important to remember that UCL’s renown isn’t a done-deal, and it cannot be taken for granted. If renown, and all the money that comes with it, is important, then this latest rebrand was perhaps a step taken to maintain it, not just a waste of money.
Ultimately, criticising the new logo feels like a poor substitute for the culture that spawned it: the culture of universities as transitory institutions, in the sense that all we seem to do is pass through them, many of us feeling short-changed at the end. The university as a printer of degrees rather than a producer of learned individuals is a feeling admittedly commonplace amongst us humanities students.
The culture of universities as corporations seems here to stay, and with it comes the unfortunate truth of brand identities and boorish slogans: here, tedium can happen.
Is our dissatisfied reaction to this new logo a symptom of a much greater hurt? Probably, but it might also be a necessary step in maintaining a precarious institution utterly dependent, for better or for worse, on global renown.
There is concern about how much this rebrand cost, but, as was pointed out about the King’s rebrand, if it attracts just a handful more international students, it will more than pay for itself.