The history of Pepperdine's new logo
Today Pepperdine went public with a new logo for the university, a shield featuring the Phillips Theme Tower. According to guidance from the university's marketing folks, the new logo, which they call the "shield icon," is intended to be used in tight spaces (especially online) where the full Pepperdine wordmark doesn't fit. It will not replace the lettermark that I think of as the "wavy P", which will continue to be used by the athletics programs. Instead, it is meant to represent the university as a whole.
The shield icon may be new, but it has deep roots in Pepperdine's iconography. The colors, the elements depicted, and even the shape have been part of the university's visual identity from the earliest days of George Pepperdine College in South Los Angeles. To better understand the new logo, let's step through the history of Pepperdine's symbols.
Pepperdine has not always had a real logo to speak of. As late as the 1960s, official signage and publications often featured the word Pepperdine written in plain fonts without consistent distinguishing features. For many of those years, the closest thing to a logo at Pepperdine was the seal, which goes all the way back to the first year of the college's existence.
In March 1938, a women's service organization called Alpha Gamma designed a seal featuring the sun setting over ocean waves, with the university's founding date of 1937.1 Later that spring, the student body adopted a slightly redesigned version of the seal for use on class rings and pins, with the prominent addition of the administration building from the Vermont Avenue campus and the university motto, "Freely ye received; freely give."2 This gained official recognition by 1939, when the university used the seal on the commencement program.3
These early seals feature elements present in today's shield icon, beginning with the shield shape (called an escutcheon in the terminology of heraldry). They also have ocean waves and mountains in the background, both of which survive in the modern design. Moreover, they feature a distinctive campus building: the administration building from the LA campus, which foreshadows the use of the theme tower in today's shield icon.
The original seal was used for several decades, with only minor tweaks. For example, once Pepperdine opened campuses outside of Los Angeles, the city was omitted from the seal. In the 1970s, as Pepperdine was expanding rapidly and rising to national prominence, there was a period of experimentation that introduced a number of different designs. The most important for our purposes is the seal of Seaver College that began appearing in publications around 1978.4
The Seaver seal borrows several elements from the 1938 version, including the ocean waves, the mountains, the sunbeams, and the circular frame. But it gives up the escutcheon altogether, and it introduces for the first time the Phillips Theme Tower, which had only just been erected on the Malibu campus and was already becoming a symbol of the university.
The Seaver seal proved so successful that it inspired a similar seal for the whole university, which first appeared circa 1979.5 The new design re-cast the circular frame as a ribbon, brought back the motto and the university's founding date, played up the sunbeams, and introduced clouds. Notice also how the 1979 seal accurately portrays the theme tower as a bifurcated obelisk with a colored cross-shaped inlay.
The 1979 seal remains the official seal of the university, and it is cited as the main inspiration behind the new shield icon, which borrows its waves, mountains, and tower (though the tower looks more like the one in the Seaver seal).6 The shield icon differs in a couple important ways from the 1970s-era seals:
it reintroduces the escutcheon that was featured in the school's earliest seals, this time with sleeker rounded edges,
it shortens the theme tower so it can be wider relative to the frame, and
it uses a pop of orange for the first time, making full use of the university’s colors, which were chosen for George Pepperdine College in 1937.
On the whole, I quite like the shield icon. Its designers, led by Keith Lungwitz of IMC, did a nice job of simplifying the (admittedly busy) seal into something that will work better in smaller spaces, while keeping just enough elements to make it feel of a piece with 85+ years of the university's visual identity.
"Alpha Gamma Presents Suggested School Seal," The Graphic, 16 Mar. 1938: 1.
"Pepperdine Classes Adopt Student Seal,” The Graphic, 18 May 1938: 1.
"Second Annual Commencement, 1939," Pepperdine University Commencement Collection, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.
"Spring Commencement, 1978," Pepperdine University Commencement Collection, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.
"Fall Commencement, 1979," Pepperdine University Commencement Collection, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.
"Pepperdine University Launches New Logo," Pepperdine Newsroom, 8 Jan. 2024.