Overview
Sandy Barbour was in discussions to endow a new Sport Management institute within Isenberg, and I was asked to design the mark for it before those plans were finalized. While institute never came to fruition, the logo was fully developed as a real deliverable—built to carry the weight of an endowed program while fitting cleanly into the existing UMass and Isenberg visual family, all with a nod to the movement of the sport industry behind the institute.
The problem
A new institute’s mark has to do two things that pull in slightly different directions: it needs to read as unmistakably part of the university and the business school—not a rogue sub-brand—while still being distinct enough to function as its own identity, since an endowed institute typically operates with a degree of visibility separate from the department that houses it. Getting that balance wrong in either direction either erases the institute’s identity or makes it look disconnected from the institution funding it.
My approach
- Building the icon in a modified Frutiger. Frutiger is the standard typeface across both UMass and Isenberg brand guidelines, so I used it as the structural basis for the mark’s icon, then modified it enough to give the institute its own graphic identity rather than a straight wordmark.
- Working within an established color logic. The palette was chosen specifically to sit comfortably within both the UMass and Isenberg color systems at once, so the mark wouldn’t look like it belonged to only one half of its own institution.
- Designing for a name, not a program. Without a finalized mission statement or program structure to design around, the mark had to represent the Barbour name and its institutional context rather than a specific set of activities—a more restrained brief than most identity work.
Reflection
This project is a straightforward logo design sample, but it’s also a demonstration of brand-systems literacy: understanding two overlapping sets of institutional guidelines well enough to design something that belongs to both without contradicting either. It’s a useful counterpoint to the campaign work—smaller in scope, but a clean example of foundational identity design done inside real institutional constraints.