With a new chancellor, updates to the UC Berkeley brand

With one of the strongest academic and athletic brands in the world, UC Berkeley has long had to contend with the fact that those two institutions are known by different names: UC Berkeley and Cal. 

Nationally, over two-thirds of people surveyed think that UC Berkeley and Cal are different, unrelated organizations. That confusion is what led to the launch of the Berkeley/Cal Identity Task Force in 2022, an effort to partner with leaders and brand experts across our community to unify our campus’s distinct identities and connect UC Berkeley to its fellow University of California campuses.

This year, the results of that task force have begun to roll out across the campus, including an updated visual toolkit, new editorial guidance and more recommendations to unite the UC Berkeley and Cal identities. With the launch of a new campus brand website, Berkeley News sat down with Neil Freese, the campus’s interim executive director for marketing & brand, to discuss how the brand has evolved in the last few months and how it will continue to change. 

It seems like every person has their own way of describing what is formally known as the University of California, Berkeley. So what are we: Berkeley? Cal? UC Berkeley?

Neil Freese: The answer is that on the academic side of the house, we are UC Berkeley, while our Athletics name remains Cal. During the UC Berkeley/Cal Task Force process, we conducted a series of polls about name and brand recognition. We found that with internal audiences, people valued both names — UC Berkeley and Cal — but for different reasons. Berkeley, to our community, means academic excellence, and Cal resonates because of the connection to school spirit and our heritage. 

Folks want to embrace both, and they want to see a softening of the separation between the academic and athletic sides. We’re a community of people who want to feel connected to this campus, and one way we can do that is by bringing both sides together. It doesn’t have to be by combining our names, but it can be how we embrace our different identities. 

Just a few months ago, the campus rolled out a campaign to unify Berkeley and Cal, the first brand update in 10 years. What’s changed since then?

We’re leaning toward calling ourselves UC Berkeley instead of Berkeley in most cases. We had a new chancellor start in July, and we wanted to provide Chancellor Rich Lyons the opportunity to see the work we’ve done and to reflect on how the brand refresh aligns with his vision of the university. It was an opportunity to bring the chancellor into this work, and it’s really powerful to have his support in advancing the work of connecting UC Berkeley and Cal, and deepening a connection to the UC system. 

And what about that “B” logo everyone had a reaction to on social media?

Brands evolve and change over time, especially when they move from the design and planning stages into the implementation stage. Our identity system is a dynamic one, and we have a set of brand marks that scale from smallest to largest, from simplest to most complex. They are meant to be flexible for the needs of each use case. The “B” monogram is a component of that identity system, and it will remain as the social media icon for the main campus channels. The “B” can also be used in other contexts where space is limited, so it’ll be interesting to follow its journey now that the brand is out in the real world. 

What’s the next step in this brand refresh?

In a broad sense, the brand is just a set of guidelines, and so now our community gets to put it to work, give shape to the ideas and concepts and get creative with the toolkit. We’ll be encouraging our community to share their work with us so that we can showcase it on our brand site.

More specifically, we have a big list of to-dos. Here are two: this fall we’ll start work on updating the look and feel of Open Berkeley, our campus web platform, to align with the new brand, and in the spring we’ll be redesigning the campus home page.