Lindsay Stuart • May 14th, 2021
From logos to fonts, color palettes and voice guidelines, documenting your brand identity helps ensure consistency no matter where your brand appears. In this series, we’re featuring some of the best brand style guides from companies in our community.
Louisiana State University’s Athletics department is well-known for its outstanding performance and the unrivaled passion and pride of its fan base. Traditionally, LSU has the most watched games on broadcast network television, as well as online streaming platforms. With a total of 47 team National Championships, including 43 NCAA-sponsored national titles, the LSU Athletics brand is defined by generations of Tigers united by purple and gold.
LSU’s brand guidelines live in Lingo and are packed full of valuable information to help ensure brand consistency and increase efficiency for anyone working with LSU Athletics branded materials.
The Kit begins with an overview of the Louisiana State University Athletics Brand, including the brand narrative and an explanation of the importance of brand equity. The LSU brand narrative is the central building block of the brand, built with analytics and both internal and external feedback, and acts as the beacon and guiding light for everyone at the organization. After establishing the brand narrative, the LSU Athletics team created a hype video featuring staff members fans do not normally see — the team behind the team — to help illustrate the importance and impact of the brand.
Prior to using Lingo, LSU’s style guide and assets were stored using a one page PDF with information about logos, colors, and fonts. As a large organization, files were typically located across a range of storage solutions and were sometimes outdated or incorrect. Lingo serves as a central location where everyone across the organization can access the information and up-to-date files they need quickly and easily.
LSU Executive Director for Creative Services Jason Feirman shared that when building the brand guidelines Kit, “We formed multiple internal committees from different departments to address different areas to audit existing logos, establish the messaging which created our Brand Narrative and tone words, and then a final group to work on the usage guidelines language and creation. We added the Primary logo first, followed by the many different color variations and file types most commonly requested by media, staff and organizations we work with.”
Next, the Kit showcases elements of LSU’s visual identity, which is more than a century old. The University was founded in 1863 and official sports programs started in 1893. Though logos were not established until later, the colors Purple and Gold (1893) and the nickname Tiger (1896) are synonymous with the LSU. It was important for the brand guidelines to include the rich history around LSU’s visual identity for context and this information can be found in sections showcasing the brand’s colors and official names.
Over the last two decades, LSU’s visual identity has been established and refined to be made simple and timeless. Derived from vintage logos and other attributes that were woven into the identity of the University throughout its history, LSU’s custom logos are built to be used alone or in combination depending on the application.
When constructing brand guidelines it’s critical to include images that illustrate proper logo use, along with contextual information to help clarify best practices. The key do’s and don’ts of using the LSU logo are provided to ensure consistency and appropriate use wherever the logo may appear.
Colors are a commonly used brand asset and documenting your brand colors, along with where and when each color should be used, is an important part of every brand’s style guide. Color needs to be used consistently in combination with a brand’s messaging to ensure immediate recognition and response.
When you think of the LSU Tigers, you think Purple and Gold. Purple and Gold are the primary colors for all brand applications, both internally and externally. Throughout this section of the Brand Guidelines Kit there is contextual information around proper usage, CMYK and PMS values for reference, as well as information about the history behind the use of LSU’s iconic colors.
It is believed that these colors were worn for the first time by an LSU team in the spring of 1893 when the LSU baseball squad beat Tulane in the first intercollegiate contest played in any sport by Louisiana State University. Team captain E.B. Young reportedly hand-picked those colors for the LSU squad. Later that year, the first LSU football game was played, and on November 25, 1893, football coach and chemistry professor Dr. Charles Coates and some of his players went into town to purchase ribbons to adorn their gray jerseys as they prepared to play the first LSU gridiron game. Stores were stocking ribbons in the colors of Mardi Gras — purple, gold, and green — for the coming Carnival season, but none of the green had arrived yet at Reymond’s Store at the corner of Third and Main streets. Coates and quarterback Ruffin Pleasant bought up all of the purple and gold stock and made it into rosettes and badges — and the rest is history.
LSU’s copyrighted fonts are showcased alongside important contextual information around the history of each typeface and use guidelines. Other approved fonts are also available for download.
In addition to standard brand style guide elements like logos, colors, and fonts, the LSU Athletics Brand Guidelines Kit also includes important guidance around social media use, tone, email signatures, and more. By including these sections, LSU is ensuring anyone writing copy or representing the LSU brand on public platforms keeps the brand’s voice and presence consistent.
“The conversation every day of the year, and especially during games, meets, matches and tournaments, all thrive on social media. Our teams and departments have massive social audiences with tremendous engagement. The guidelines and policies we have in place for our 75+ official accounts assist staff, coaches, interns, student worker, and partners of LSU Athletics in making appropriate decisions when using official accounts. Many different areas are covered in the guidelines to prepare the manager of each account,” said Jason Feirman.
With 21 varsity sports and almost 50 different departments that all have unique logos, it was important for the LSU Athletics team to also build out a suite of Lingo Kits to assist on a team-by-team basis. Using Lingo’s Brand Portal functionality, they were able to create a one stop shop for their assets where everyone who needs access to the LSU brand guidelines also has access to the department and sport-specific assets and information they need. This includes unique logos or vintage logos that help their teams.
“One of our favorite features of the Lingo software is the capability to upload one vector file and Lingo makes it available for the user in multiple file formats. This streamlined the process of creating and maintaining our asset library tremendously.” — Jason Feirman, LSU
The LSU Athletics brand guidelines are introduced during new staff onboarding and orientation, used daily by external communications, creative, and equipment staff for reference, and are also shared with various third party vendors that are authorized to use LSU brand assets for their projects. Because the guidelines live online in Lingo, it’s easy for the team to make changes as they grow or change any of the materials in real-time as needed.
Thank you to LSU Athletics and Jason Feirman for sharing with us!