First impressions are important. In the wider field of graphic design — rife with slick poseurs, ardent objectivists, gleeful contrarians, and vague distant relations who could’ve done the job better for peanuts — first impressions are do-or-die.
“If St. Ignatius saw this, he would wish he’d been hit in the head by the cannonball instead of the leg,” roughly reads one of the most-liked comments on Fordham University’s rebrand announcement on Instagram.
The new identity system debuted with a sizzle reel on July 31, 2025 — a Thursday. Headlining (and, on Instagram, thumbnail-ing) the rebrand was a new primary F mark, but the new brand system includes a host of new marks, lockups, palettes, font pairings, slogans, and communication guidelines. Thousands of hours of work between brand agency Ologie and the university’s various in-house teams lay behind a new system applied to every corner of Fordham’s branding, and it was all introduced to the public in one sizzle reel.
The community sentiment was overwhelmingly negative. Fordham — its marketers, its in-house designers, and the firm it contracted to execute the rebrand — failed to make a good first impression.
Few fields besides graphic design produce work so ubiquitous and so commonly consumed that arbiters of taste hand down judgement simply on the sole qualification of having commonly consumed the work. Few highly technical professions have as low a barrier of entry.
A desk-duty middle manager “whipping something up” is inconceivable in a machine shop. Tech firms are not scrambling to democratize HVAC maintenance by harnessing the power of AI. To be sure, there are unappeasable blowhards managing (and even leading) every profession. Few outside of modern art, however, use familiarity with the end product — combined with a certainty in its complete subjectivity — to exert control on the finished product with little more than vibes-based judgment, as is du jour in graphic design.
“I showed this logo to my dog, and he didn’t like it. Could you make it pop more?”
First impressions are about getting out ahead of it all. They’re about establishing total expertise and trustworthiness, communicating at the level of the target audience, and presenting a solved problem. A first impression is not defensive — aimed to answer questions before they’re asked — it’s offensive: here is the problem, here is the solution, and here are the different benchmarks by which the problem is solved.
It is rarely so easy. It is the unfortunate reality that a graphic designer’s job — just as much as the software manipulation, the vendor visits, and the constant portfolio building — is to sell themselves and prove their professional worth at all times.
It’s a matter of first impressions. Get good at them, or hunker down for the blowback.
Through graphic design and marketing, I was sold a particular vision of Fordham University as a prospective student. Beyond the smiling faces and lists of majors, I was offered an academic experience based in a long tradition of Jesuits — bona-fide hippies of the Catholic world — and their knack for top-of-the-line educational institutions. I was promised a two-campus experience that blurred the boundaries between the city and the institution; sold on the slogan “New York is my campus, Fordham is my school.”
Fordham was marketed to me as an old guard of do-gooders intermeshed with the largest, most diverse city in the nation. A gem of tradition and near-mystique that welcomed skeptics, religious and otherwise.
I was intrigued by Jesuit-in-origin but progressive-to-this-day tenets of holistic care and advocacy; of radical acceptance and an obligation to serve others. A lifetime public school product, I read the glossy Fordham mailers and decided that these Catholics had the right idea.
On Accepted Students’ Day, then-President Joseph M. McShane, S.J. threw the crowd a line that stuck with me: “You come to Fordham, I can promise you one thing. You will be bothered here.”
I did. I was.
Marketing by nature over-promises, and Fordham University was no exception. The values the school plastered everywhere were not statements of fact. Taken optimistically, they were aspirational.
When I saw the school at its best, those values were exactly that.
Drawing from a well-publicized font of tradition, students and faculty held the school to its own professed standards and implored it to do better. Over and over, Fordham University was told that it was better than — had been better than, must return to being better than, could someday be better than — its reality. It could integrate better into its surroundings and give back to the communities in which it resided. It could represent a cross-section of the city population. It could stand up for the oppressed and offer a guiding light for the truth-seekers.
The marketing was turned back around on itself: Fordham was old enough and wise enough — and had the right priorities in place — to do what’s right.
Though nonlinear and frequently slower than needed, change at Fordham felt present and possible by design. Marketing told a glossier tale, and branding tied it up in a bow, but the real story was in there, moving ever-closer to the ideal.
Isn’t that what being Catholic is all about? A lifelong struggle for that which is out of reach? Highest-of-high standards that force us to commit to the long, glorious, futile, imperfect journey?
By its own marketing, Fordham was old. It was storied. It called its community to be Christlike. When wielded by the community, it was self-actualizing.
Hopeful, staccato strings crescendo into megachurch drums — all suspiciously stock-sounding — and Fordham’s new brand makes its first impression.
The first visual is a close-up detail of the old letterforms morphing into the new. This technique is helpful when trying to convey to an audience an effort to subtly and faithfully modernize typography — by way of a smooth transition effect, designers show that there is a trace of the old in the new; there is continuity in the refinement. It is not nearly as helpful in the present application, as one typeface simply expands into a separate, chunkier and less detailed typeface. We watch the wordmark lose character in real time.
The reel continues, and we read that the brand is “inspired by bringing tradition and architecture together.” The tradition referenced goes undefined in the video. We are, however, shown that the architecture component is of the neo-gothic variety found in the older buildings on the picturesque Rose Hill campus, including the flagship Keating Hall.
“Collegiate Gothic” architecture is a recognizable hallmark of many colleges and universities, the 19th-century style of choice to call back to the the world’s oldest, most venerated learning institutions.
My college search included countless road trips and campus tours, and I considered architecture to be an important part of my assessment of a school. Neo-gothic buildings, while beautiful, began to blur together very quickly.
Gothic architecture is a notable feature of one campus, but not a university-defining one. There is no gothic architecture on the Lincoln Center campus, the Westchester campus, nor the Calder Center, nor Fordham London Center. New construction at Rose Hill adopts a contemporary style that, most charitably, is gothic-inspired.
Possessing old buildings constructed in neo-gothic style, widely popular within an institution’s niche for the time, contained within a single campus, is a limited foundation on which to build a contemporary global brand.
To pin a particular architectural style to a multi-borough, multi-country, city-first university feels like a disservice at best, and disingenuous at worst. The tradition and architecture, as defined by the reel, seem to be one in the same: a certain style of old building.
The gothic inspiration is revealed to manifest in a blackletter, gothic-style capital F. To be clear, the letterform is not shaped by specific curves and corners of Rose Hill architecture, nor refined from a specific F cut in stone somewhere on campus. It is just gothic-inspired.
The F mark itself is inoffensive, even adequately constructed. It just doesn’t mean much.
The gothic F ostensibly replaces the existing block-letter F used for merchandise and sports branding, though the gothic F is further elevated to the primary mark, used across almost all implementations of the brand, including athletics. For an academic institution to increase, not decrease, emphasis on and ubiquity of a big, red F seems to invite the usual jeers the Fordham community is used to in even greater numbers.
The block F was an extremely simple lettermark, borne of design, printing, and embroidery constraints of old. By virtue of its antiquated beginning — compared to the pseudo-antiquated, gothic-inspired F — the block F communicated a specific brand of collegiate tradition. Far from clever or symbolic in its own right, the block F aligns with a pared-back view on university branding: the name is more important than the mark. Block letters are accepted collegiate visual vernacular: the more austere, the more retro; the simpler, the better-connected to time long past.
Longevity — enough to infuse history and meaning — beats clever design most days. Though the newcomer gothic F does not hold the same richness of significance, it is relied upon much more heavily in the new brand than the block F was in the old.
The reel rolls on. The seal of Fordham University appears, then is grayed, and a shield shape is found within it. The shield contains the Christogram IHS, the central symbol on the Jesuit emblem. The Christogram is also grayed — the focus is drawn only to the outline of the shield.
The shield is not uniquely shaped or proportioned. The particular shape does not itself feature prominently in Jesuit imagery. The university seal is not widely noted for the shield it contains. It is wholly without defining characteristic.
The reel adds the shape to the primary mark — the gothic F layered on top of the shield shape. The music crescendoes; this is the big reveal.
The shield would seem to have little reason to be elevated so. Like the F atop it, the shield as a symbol is set up to fail, robbed of significance. The most the shield shape can communicate, given a shield shape is ubiquitous in university seals and coats-of-arms, is that Fordham is, in fact, a learning institution.
Much like blackletter gothic type, shields are not limited to higher education, however. The mark could serve well as a luxury hotel chain, medieval castle conservatory, or line of high-end pens.
Combined, the gothic F and shield mark can only communicate that Fordham may be a university, and it might also be old. Broad, shallow meaning is given priority — isolated, even; championed — and the resulting mark struggles to differentiate the brand among a given lineup of contemporary university marks.
It is a surface-level execution of the reel’s original premise: combining tradition and architecture. An invitation to search for deeper meaning — to be drawn into the complicated world of the university — is absent.
Newer institutions attempting to affect an old-world, ivy look would arrive at a similar depth of meaning in a mark. To borrow a term from the world of post-millennial sports franchises, it’s not a throwback; it’s a fauxback.
The full lockup fades into view. Narrow tolerances and sharp intersections created by layering the F over the shield bring tension to the mark. The letters below, in contrast, are unremarkable and smooth, with slightly flared pseudo-serifs so small and subtle as to be barely noticeable. The lockup is discordant — sharp and smooth, hair-fine and ultra-thick, nearly two different approaches — and it communicates very little, positive or otherwise, about the institution.
The former wordmark is as intricate as the seal that accompanied it in the former lockup — finer, varied-weight lines, curving, near-organic serifs, and tight tracking. The seal itself, the purest and primary visual signifier of Fordham University, is worth more taken as a single symbol than as a collection of its many elements. Much like the shield shape, a seal is a common signifier of authority in academia and elsewhere — but unlike the shield alone, it has prominent, unique elements that help it to stand out, even when the finer details are ignored.
It was more to manage — a bigger lift, I’m sure, to apply to some edge cases. The lockup is a more intricate, delicate visual balancing act of type, space, and legibility. The payoff for successful application, on the other hand, is visual richness equally full in meaning.
Simplifying visual identities for screens was law at the dawn of social media, but the phones of the 2020s have more pixels than the human eye can discern. If the simplification of the primary lockup was a technical move, motivated by readability, such an arguable overcorrection replaces the quirks and visual signifiers of the old lockup with forgettable symbolism.
When less is more, the less conveys similar meaning in a deeper, more visually efficient way. The extra space is an invitation. The simpler forms have meaning behind every angle and color choice. When less is just less, meaning is traded for trendy aesthetics — and functionality, if you’re lucky.
In a Logos and Branding class at Fordham University, I participated in a Q&A with Armin Vit, graphic designer and publisher/writer of Brand New, a chronicle and frequent editorial of high-profile rebrands as they happened. He told us “Designers love to talk shit. They love saying they could’ve done better, and they have no idea what went into the design process, or how many people they had to convince.”
He was right, of course. Fordham’s rebrand — to my slight disappointment, only marked “noted,” not “reviewed” on Brand New — was their initiative alone, and all who worked on it surely worked hard and delivered to the best of their ability. Designers love to talk shit, and you’re reading it right now.
The lion’s share of community sentiment around Fordham’s first impression of the rebrand, however, didn’t discount effort. It didn’t criticize color, type, and layout. Some called it corporate, bland, discordant, trendy, nothing special, and too great of a change, to be sure.
Most, however, just asked “Why?”
Deeming a rebrand unnecessary is one of the most damning indictments an audience can hand out. With a legacy brand adapted to modern applications — as I experienced firsthand as a prospective student, attendee, and now alum — Fordham did not appear to be suffering from a brand that held itself back visually. On the copy end, Jesuit tenets and aspirational sloganeering with real-world meaning seemed to elevate Fordham above standard university marketing of the “leading,” “soaring,” “succeeding” ilk. In sum, and reflected in increasing admissions, new construction, rising tuition, and overflowing dorms, the Fordham brand appeared to be working.
It matters why Fordham thought it necessary to rebrand — as the sizzle reel, supporting documentation and further posting paid little attention to the “Why” behind it all.
In a hostile comments section, the Fordham University Instagram account met most negative comments with a condescendingly corporate-cheerful, “bestie”-laden tone. The purpose of the interactions — or at least the objective as executed — seemed to be refuting criticism. Given the chance to acknowledge community concerns, redirect to positive aspects of the new brand, or simply provide a rationale — business, academic, or otherwise — for the initiative, the university chose snarky one-liners.
After a failed first impression, Fordham was on the defensive, chiding members of the community with internet slang for accusing the rebrand of missing the mark.
Since the first announcement of the new brand, Fordham has published a few videos and rounded out top-line applications. Many Fordham-affiliated accounts have been made to adopt the exact same profile picture — not coordinated, not sporting fresh illustrations in the new brand style, not even color-differentiated. A parade of red Fs assemble at the top of my Instagram feed like a brutal report card. Any trace of the Ramses, the mascot, in the brand has been removed, not evolved.
Applied for a week — all the video content, the webpages, the merch — the brand does little to assuage concerns expressed in the comments section of Fordham’s one shot at a first impression.
Visual cues, footage, copy, and even Fordham’s iconic maroon hat — a giveaway so common every student has at least one — seem flatter. They feel less unique. In forgoing actual tradition in favor of common signifiers of tradition, the rebrand’s primary motivation seems to be a very shallow, zero-sum idea of marketability.
The new brand feels like the New York I imagined as a suburban mid-Atlantic teenager, before I came to Fordham. The brand leverages basic, cookie-cutter identifiers of the city, the university, and the general pursuit of education at the expense of authenticity — the single most important buzzword in the conversation on how to market to Generation Z and younger.
At every turn, the rebrand feels isolated from Fordham — or Fordham, seen from 30,000 feet. It reads like an outsider’s idea of what New York is like. It largely ignores the Bronx, only concerned with the campus inside Rose Hill’s spiked wrought-iron fence. It forgoes the Lincoln Square neighborhood and its cultural powerhouses in favor of wide-angle shots of the larger Manhattan skyline.
It is a strong recentering of Rose Hill as the main campus — despite enrollment testing dorm capacity at Lincoln Center — and on the way, it treats the city as an accessory; a destination to visit, not something to live within.
Would it come as any surprise that Ologie, the firm behind the rebrand, is based in Ohio?
Would it further shock and stun that Ologie markets itself as a consultant exclusively for the academic field? A firm fully tapped into the trends of collegiate branding and marketing delivered a final product they knew would satisfy the aesthetic tastes of that world. A firm based hundreds of miles from the cultural and design capital of the nation, maybe the world — and largest city in the United States by millions and millions — made a brand formerly inextricable from the city it called home almost entirely independent of it.
In the new brand collateral — especially the first sizzle reel — there are no design, music, videography, or contributing credits shouting out Fordham students or graduates. Beyond focus groups and “participants” mentioned offhand, it seems Fordham neglected to use its own brain trust — or the top-of-market design resources of New York City — to inform the rebrand in any significant way.
For a cynic, the rebrand is in sum more faithful to the school’s value system in practice — and a more pragmatic summation of what draws wide swathes of bright suburban kids and their tuition dollars to New York. Whether this will further bolster application rates and convince more deep pockets and their progeny to wear Fordham maroon is yet to be seen, but the calculus is there.
That logic is void of aspiration; a contemporary data-driven coldness that equates a university’s profit with its value. This outlook sees a spoken desire to improve the world, no matter the cost, as ignorant idealism; a failure to play by today’s terms. It dismisses aspirational, heritage branding as functionally useless.
While a more secular outward appearance is by definition marketable to a larger audience, the appeal of a Catholic institution more skeptical than dogmatic was an intriguing selling point when it came time to commit. An ancient order dedicated to the greater glory of creation was busy celebrating beauty and understanding the world around them, not mandating faith pledges and enforcing curfews, and they wanted people to come to their school with all their questions and doubts. The kind of person energized by that prospect seems like the ideal Fordham candidate; a value match beyond Sunday service.
In the comments of the first reel, Fordham claimed to have developed the rebrand by community committee, citing alumni outreach that must have missed my inbox. Graphic design is a subjective profession, but that Thursday, beyond any technical critique, Fordham could not sell a brand to its own community that was engineered to be more marketable. There is a soullessness to the rebrand that any Fordham Ram, past or present, could pick out.
The rebrand’s primary slogan is “For What Matters.” That’s not shortened in any way, nor is it an attempt at satire. Put another way, the slogan amounts to “We have values.” Making specific, stated values secondary to the idea of possessing principles results in just as flat an end product as any visual component of the new brand. Significance is sacrificed for trend and sizzle — executed bluntly. Turned back around on itself, the brand poses a hollow question: What matters?
In the face of a flat, derivative visual identity and an uninspiring message, there is no satisfying answer.