CU Boulder Brand Refresh 2023–2025
Refreshing the University of Colorado Boulder’s brand was a complex, layered, and in‑house effort to better align voice, visuals, and values.
Goals
Identify and solve for shortcomings in brand voice, visual identity, and their alignment with the university’s mission and vision
Create centralized resources, assets, and training for consistent, high‑quality branded work
Increase student retention
Enhance CU Boulder’s reputation
My contributions
Lead the evolution of the brand’s visual identity
Aligned visual identity with university mission and vision, brand promise, brand character, and audience needs
Determined the initial process of auditing the brand and evaluating past designs
Art‑directed and created template designs and assets
Established repeatable and measurable creative processes
Built communities to audit, manage, and evolve the brand continuously
Challenge
CU Boulder’s brand lacked key information, leading to inconsistent messaging and visuals. Brand guidelines were outdated, vague, overly restrictive, and inconsistently applied.
The visual identity was designed for a narrow range of audiences and media and there was no central hub for brand resources. As a result, employees were missing the tools, knowledge, and support needed to create on-brand work consistently.
Due to budget constraints, the brand audit and refresh were handled in-house.
Research
Brand Audit
CU Boulder employees were divided into working groups of subject matter experts (SMEs). We conducted a brand audit by collecting branded materials from campus units produced in the last 3 years.
The team created and distributed two surveys to CU Boulder communications staff. The first measured how well the materials followed brand guidelines. The second assessed how effectively the designs served their audience, aligned visuals with content, and suited their platform.
Survey Results and current state report
Of 31 professionals invited to take the surveys, 26 completed Survey 1 and 16 completed Survey 2. The team analyzed the results by comparing scores between brand alignment and the design’s success in terms of serving the audience, content, and platform.
A current state report summarized key findings. Both the survey results and broader audit insights highlighted strengths to build on and areas for improvement in CU Boulder’s visual identity.
Strengths:
Most assets followed brand guidelines.
Designs were generally consistent, on-tone, audience-appropriate, and platform-aware.
Core brand elements: CU Boulder Gold, Helvetica Neue, and the “Be Boulder” messaging platform.
Authenticity emphasized in photography style.
Opportunities:
Brand guidelines are applied inconsistently. Some are too rigid while others undefined.
Visual identity is tailored to limited audiences and media types and is not aligned to mission.
Brand lacks a clear, unified character and voice.
Designers lack centralized resources and access to brand tools and assets.
Recommendations for improvement
We suggested a phased approach including the following recommendations:
Improved guidance on lockup usage
Define a typography hierarchy
Define a secondary color palette
Identify which brand guidelines to keep, revise, add, or remove
Identify specific graphic elements that would enhance creative flexibility while better reflecting the brand’s character and voice
Create systems and processes to evaluate and evolve the brand
Centralize assets and templates
Create templates and resources
Create trainings and roll out new materials
All new guidelines would be tested before rollout.
Infographics visual testing
Mockups and testing
Once specific recommendations for improvement were determined, we could begin the experimentation phase. For example, a secondary color pallete was found as a solution, but what would the colors be?
Mockups explored secondary fonts and colors, typography hierarchy, specific photo editing, graphic elements, icon style, infographics style, and more.
Color palette testing
Revising guidelines
Synthesizing all findings found from the mockups and testing proved difficult. Through focusing on audience and alignment to the newly developed brand positioning, clear, succinct, and complete brand guidelines formed.
It was important to me that the new guidelines were clear while allowing for more flexibility and creativity than before.
Solutions
Visual identity updates
The visual identity updates reflect the university’s mission, vision, and priorities as well as the brand promise and character attributes.
Other updates were made that aren’t featured here. Below are explanations of why we made some of the decisions we did regarding the visual identity.
Secondary color palette
The primary CU Boulder colors remained unchanged to leverage the brand equity. Because the previous guidelines were to pull secondary colors from photos, many of the color used across materials were not consistent. The addition of a secondary color pallet solved this issue.
Accessible CU Gold solved all the accessibility issues with text on white backgrounds. This exact color was already adopted by another CU campus.
Light CU gold was created by tinting CU Gold enough that it could be used as an off white and remain accessible.
CUB sky blue is a variation of the blue used for links on the website that references the blue skies of Colorado. It serves as a bright and eye-catching color that compliments CU Gold.
CUB Dark Blue is a shade of CUB Sky blue while CUB Light Blue is a tint. Both can be used accessibly with primary colors.
Secondary font
An official secondary font was never defined before. The team chose Noto Serif because:
An official secondary font would increase brand consistency
A serif would compliment CU Boulder’s sans-serif font, Helvetica Neue
Many weights and variations
Easily accessed through Google fonts or Adobe CC
Visually represented leadership, research, tradition, and was designed with legibility in mind
Designing resources
After the guidelines were finalized, my next task was to design templates, examples, and visuals for the revised brand website that reinforce and embody the refreshed guidelines.
A main goal of mine was to show how specific graphic elements, typography choices, photo use, and layout style could be in brand while catering to the content and the platform of the template.
Branded templates for social media were a high-impact solution to improving the brand’s consistency.
I designed templates that were flexible enough for many uses and audiences. Broad templates for displaying stats and rankings, event promotion, and student success messaging helped content creators across campus create engaging, on-brand and high quality content.
Social media posts created from branded templates
This admissions brochure example was designed with younger audiences in mind. This design communicates how to use new brand elements altogether including graphic elements and infographics.
CU Boulder brand site 2025
Graphic elements
Texture, illustration, and other design elements were not addressed in previous guidelines. Because of this lack of information, designs lacked consistency, warmth, interest, and sometimes fun.
Paper textures allow for creativity, variety, and can create a look geared toward younger audiences
Paper rips add visual interest and serve as a way to incorporate photos into a design in a deeper way
Use of campus textures and scenics
CU Boulder branded stickers used as graphic elements added texture and whimsey to designs
Thin hand drawn lines used for emphasis and doodles like stars, brackets, and arrows gave designs a younger and more personalized feel
Photography style
The original photo guidelines did not allow for any photo editing whatsoever. This strict photojournalist approach no longer served all of CU Boulder’s audiences. Most of the CU Boulder’s photo style guidelines remained the same, the following specific photo edits were added to the guidelines. This opened the photo style up to more alignment with brand colors, and to more creativity without losing the authenticity.
Cut outs
Paper rips and textures
Black and white photos
Subtle grain and halftone dots
All refreshed guidelines were compiled into in one document that was used to create the content for a new CU Boulder brand site. Refreshing the site was a collaborative effort between writers, graphic designers, and UI/UX designers.
The CU Boulder brand site went through two iterations. In it’s current form, the site includes the most up-to-date brand information and examples, houses assets like photo galleries, video assets, and departmental lockups, and links to resources such as brand toolkits, website guidelines, and receiving brand support.
Admissions brochure example
Brochure featuring infographics example
Results
CU Boulder’s statewide perception rose 5 points in the Spring 2025 annual survey
All designs produced after the brand refresh followed ADA accessibility standards
Dramatically improved brand consistency and alignment with mission, values, character, and voice
Increased traffic to brand website from XX to XX
Centralized access to brand guidelines, templates, and resources improved efficiency and quality
New evaluation and design processes made the brand refresh repeatable, sustainable, and effective
Conclusion
The CU Boulder brand refresh (2023–2025) made significant advances. Now CU Boulder’s visual identity represents the university’s mission, values, and brand character. Because the time and resources were invested in the brand refresh, all CU Boulder designers and content creators have the brand information, tools, and resources they need for success.
More data, insights, and opportunities for improvement will arise as this iteration of the brand refresh is applied across campus. The CU Boulder brand and visual identity will continue to evolve.