Quinnipiac’s dropped cap

Quinnipiac University has a new “brand identity system.” So says the school’s associate vice president for public relations:

This new system, which includes new wordmarks, logo marks, colors, fonts, design motifs, patterns, etc. is a modern interpretation of the past university brand and represents who we are today, a nationally recognized university with a focus on

— and so on. I can’t bring myself to quote it all.

The system includes the wordmark Quinnipiac university , with a lowercase u . In response, a Quinnipiac student has started a petition to restore the missing capital. Note to QU: when your own students are telling you that they care about capitalizing proper nouns, it’s time to listen. But the school’s vice president of public affairs says there are “no intentions of looking back.”

Those titles: I wonder how the associate vice president for public relations and the vice president of public affairs manage not to trade places in an Ovidian metamorphosis. I wonder too why the school’s vice president for brand strategy and integrated communications wasn’t the one to comment on the u .

And I wonder how much money the school spent on the branding specialists who must have advised dropping the capital — and who chose a lousy font, to boot:


[From the school’s website. It’s an image, not text, and it scales dreadfully.]

Related reading
Capitalize. This. U. (The Quinnipiac Chronicle)
Revise the New Quinnipiac University Logo (A petition at change.org)

[The students in this fight have good intentions, but I have to say it: their fight is about conventions of spelling, not grammar.]