Oklahoma City University
Partner DJ Stout and designer Carla Delgado in Pentagram's Austin office have recently completed a new identity and a rebranding of Oklahoma City University (OCU). The private urban college, located in the Uptown District of its namesake city, is affiliated with the United Methodist Church and offers a wide variety of degrees in the liberal arts, fine arts, science and business. The only Oklahoma institution listed in the top tier of the regional, master's-level university category by U.S. News and World Report, OCU is also listed in Forbes' "Best Christian Colleges" and "100 Best College Buys."
Oklahoma City University is also known for its top-notch dance, music and theater programs and its impressive track-record of placing graduates in Broadway musicals and theatrical productions, most notably in the lineups of the Radio City Rockettes. In addition to its performing arts prowess OCU is renowned for its many beauty pageant contestants, contributing $2.2 million in educational scholarships to more than 340 pageant contestants over the last 55 years. Fondly dubbed "Miss America U" for its tradition of winning pageants, OCU boasts 24 Miss Oklahomas and holds the record for Miss America winners. A larger than life-size bronze statue portraying the school's three former Miss Americas—Jane Jayroe, Susan Powell and Shawntel Smith—stands guard at the entrance to the campus.
Before Stout and Delgado redesigned it, OCU's primary logo featured a silhouetted likeness of the university's iconic Gold Star Tower, a 286-foot red brick tower built in 1953 to honor Methodists who died in World War II. The tower, an Oklahoma City landmark located prominently in the center of campus, is topped off with a 200-pound star positioned at the end of a long pole like a star on a Christmas tree. "OCU's sports teams are called The Stars after the Gold Star Tower, and many of the university's celebrity alumni, like the Tony Award-winning Kristin Chenoweth, are singers and dancers and 'stars' of the stage," says Stout. "So it only seemed natural to turn their static star into a dancing star, with just a hint of the long pole it's attached to at the top of that building."
There are are other stars at OCU as well– star faculty and researchers, stars in the classroom, on the basketball court and star alumni in business, law and medicine. "The rebranding committee we assembled told me that the student body was made up of overachievers." Says Stout, "That lead us to the notion of the rising star logo and to the simple tagline 'Rise.' to replace the more limiting 'Where you're a name, not a number' tagline."
The Pentagram team also updated OCU's caps-and-small-caps wordmark with a contemporary Roman typeface called Romain, set in a more approachable upper- and lowercase, and downplayed the word "University" in a smaller sized sans-serif face, called Houschka Pro, in all caps.
"Oklahoma City is experiencing a bit of a Renaissance at the moment," Says Stout, "Downtown is steadily getting refurbished, there's a new Olympic rowing center and now they've got a championship NBA basketball team. OCU is the only university named after the state's vibrant capitol, the largest city in Oklahoma, so we emphasized the name 'Oklahoma City', reduced the size of the word 'University' in the logotype and encouraged the school to hitch their wagon to the city's newfound momentum whenever possible. Now the city, it's namesake university and the high-kicking Rockettes can all rise up together."
