UniS
coming soon...
to a webpage near you!
The text as displayed at the top of this page, or a carefully-tweaked yet remarkably similar antialiased graphical image conveying exactly the same textual information to the reader while taking considerably longer to download, has been approved as the new University of Surrey corporate logo, courtesy of John Rushworth and colleagues at the now Flash-only Pentagram Design. [from University of Surrey gets a 'corporate' makeover..., report by Andy Gale, photograph by Matt Pannell, p3, Bare Facts issue 926 (in pdf), Thursday 29 January 1998].If you're at the university, you can check out the corporate identity guidelines laid down by the Office of recruitment, communications and marketing.
Unfortunately, UniS is already in use by The UniS Institute. You'll also recognise that combination of letters in use by UNIS Furniture, by the United Nations International School, by The University Courses on Svalbard, by UNIS Enterprises, and by UNIS Publishing. Confusion with Unisys may also be possible, especially since UNIS is a trademark of Unisys. And then there's UniSci and the University of South Australia, otherwise known as UniSA.
UniS should never be confused with etats-unis. Please inform all French speakers upon checking your favourite search engine. You'll discover that it's slang for university (arguably good) and for unicycle (arguably less good).
We understand it's pronounced Eunice. Very modern. Very hi-tech. Just like Delft Technology University, in fact.
And is unis.ac.uk registered? Noooo...
Pentagram's client list included (back when they had a website) amongst other antialiased text-as-graphics users, King's College, London, the University of Cincinnati and, perhaps unsurprisingly, The Guardian.
Further information on Pentagram is available:
- information from the Corporate Design Foundation, who wouldn't know a redirect if it hit them.
Surprisingly, Pentagram don't appear to actually use a pentagram (as shown below) for their corporate logo, preferring an anti-aliased text-as-graphics corporate identity. However, they do appear to exclusively use Apple Macintoshes, which may perhaps explain their website's own lack of readable cross-platform apostrophes, back when their website had webpages rather than nothing but some awful Flash thing. Note to Pentagram: if it can only be viewed with Flash, it's not a website.
Regardless, the image of a university is increasingly important.
UniS concept by Pentagram Design, from four letters in two fonts, authors unknown.
UniS logo recreated from Bare Facts photograph, 29 January, in around thirty seconds.
This page mentioned in Bare Facts: page 5, issue 927 (in pdf), Thursday 5 February 1998.
Geometry Applet courtesy of David Joyce.
Lloyd Wood (L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk)
this creative process took place on 31 January 1998
updated 29 May 1998 - the official new look launch date