The UB Logo

by William Greiner

We reclaimed who we were.

I can't keep those gold pins in stock. That's one thing I really am proud of: I got us back to being UB.

I've always referred to it as UB. I remember years ago driving to Albany for a meeting and we got to talking about this name thing. I said, "This is never going to work. SUNYAB: that sounds terrible. It's not like UCLA: that sounds reasonable. MIT: somehow that works. But SUNYAB: ugh! And if you're in the state colleges: SUC-Buffalo!"

The epiphany was when Tom Headrick and I went over to Indianapolis two years ago for the Final Four basketball tournament. I proudly took my usual casual attire of UB sweatshirts, t-shirts, hats. (I have the greatest collection of them. A friend of mine said to me recently, "Greiner, if you ever leave that job you won't have a wardrobe.") I took my UB paraphernalia and I wore that to the Final Four. The colors of Kentucky are blue and white, just like us, and the initials of Kentucky are UK. UK is all over the place and so is blue and white. (Somebody stole one of my jackets; they thought it was a Kentucky jacket. They swiped it right off my luggage outside the hotel. It had my name on it, too. I got a new one.)

After this exciting game between Arizona and Kentucky we're coming out of the arena and walking across the plaza to the hotel. A young woman who'd had a beer or two comes up to me tipsily and says, "I want my picture taken with a Kentucky fan."

I said to her, "Madam, I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not a Kentucky fan. I was rooting for ASU. I know their president well, I like him, I rooted for Arizona."

She said, "I don't care. I want my picture taken with you anyway."

I said, "Okay, come on." I put my arm around her, I smiled, and her boyfriend or her husband is there with the camera.

He takes my picture, he sees the UB initials, and says, "UB. What's that? Is it a junior college somewhere?"

I said, "That's the University at Buffalo - the flagship of the State University of New York!"

His comments made me think about how the visual reality makes a difference. What we see is one way of comprehending; it augments what we read and what we hear. All those parts come together. I said, "This place needs a visual identifier."

And what did we have? An absolutely beautiful Tiffany seal. The problem is, unless the thing is blown up to a diameter of about two feet, you can't tell what it is. Even then, it's kind of nondescript. There's a legend on the outside, "The State University," that you have to try and read around a circle. The Buffalo is prominent. There's a little Latin phrase - nobody knows what that means - and a bunch of garlands. What does that tell you? We're at Buffalo amid the palm fronds?

I thought, "There's got to be a better way to do this." So far as I knew, no other school had yet latched on to UB, which is what we always used locally. So I came home from the basketball tournament and I said, "We are going to fix this. We will have a design competition for our new logo. We will keep the Tiffany seal for our official identifier, but we'll have a new logo that goes on everything. And the winner is going to be an interlocking UB!"

It took us two years to get the thing designed to everyone's taste. But we finally got it and then we started putting it out. I'm telling you, I cannot keep them. I take those pins out of my lapel and give them to people. Look at all the vice presidents - they're always wearing those things. Downtown now, they say, "Here they come with their UB pins. Can I have one?"

We reclaimed who we were. This place has a proud history, it's something to hold on to. That's what our logo is really about.