| OLI Logo |
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Why a new logo?In March 2009, we began a design process to accomplish our goal of communicating OLI's matured identity, its educational value proposition, and its future goals. We wanted to preserve from the existing logo the ideas of personal development and societal progress that were conveyed by the "leap forward" concept. A new logo had to express the delicate balance between building on solid grounds and creating a truly innovative educational experience. It also had to convey OLI's unique situation of being part of a world-renowned institution, and being an agile organization. What does it mean?We choose the metaphor of "stacked objects" or "ladder" because it can reflect our iterative development philosophy, and the ideas of personal development and societal progress that we wanted to preserve. The shape of the logo was inspired by Japanese Kamon designs, popular in the West for their minimalist beauty and timelessness. Special attention was put to the proportions of the logo to allow the black area to be seen both as negative space and as 3-dimensional edges to the white and green areas, rendering them as boxes. In this "3D vision" the blue area becomes large sphere -one of which we only see its tip- representing the "solid grounds". The blue color was inspired in part by Magritte's "Castle of the Pyrenees", and the white was inspired by "ascention to light" metaphor commonly used for knowledge. The green color was chosen to complete the color pattern of the Earth, which can also help communicate a "global perspective." It has also been suggested that as 2D shapes, the blue area can be seen as an "O", the green as an "L", and the white as an "I". But the vertical symmetry and straight-up, stacked orientation of the logo is very important to maintain all the concepts described above. The font chosen is Century Gothic, whose basic geometric shapes play well to the Kamon-inspired shape of the logo. Logo UsageThe logo uses four colors. Black (#000000), White (#ffffff), Blue (#128ab3), Green (#6cab13). The white in the intersection is WHITE, not transparent. The font used is Century Gothic with custom kerning.
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