Editorial: New UCLA logo a waste of school’s money, talent
By Daily Bruin Staff
Nov. 15, 2004 9:00 p.m.
If you haven’t already noticed, UCLA has a new face.
Carrying a hefty price tag of $98,000, the school’s new logo
is both uninspiring and overpriced.
As one piece of UCLA’s new identity campaign, the logo is
nothing more than italicized font ““ yet cost as much as a
professor’s salary.
It is supposedly “inspired by the Bauhaus design
movement,” but not much designed in the last century
wasn’t influenced by the famous German school. How a
turn-of-the-century foreign design institute is analogous to a
top-tier research university, we’re still not sure.
Worse, UCLA ignored its own design school in the process. While
a film student made our new television commercial, an outside firm
was apparently needed to master the italicize function.
Utilizing the talented students and professors on campus would
have saved money and produced a much better looking final
product.
The campaign aims to reduce the visual clutter polluting
UCLA’s image, but replacing many poorly designed logos with
one extremely bad one doesn’t seem to do much good.
In this time of budget cuts and fee hikes, wouldn’t it
make more sense to invest in more meaningful ways to improve
UCLA’s image?
