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Nov 10, 2012 | On Stanford’s New Logo Typeface

The astute among you may have noticed in the last week that Stanford changed its logo typeface away from Sabon Monotype to what it now calls something that should be treated “as artwork, not as typography”. Sabon is an elegant serif typeface that was developed in Germany during the latter part of the 1960s as a response to a need for uniformity across Monotype, Linotype and hand-set fonts.

As far as the Wayback Machine could tell, the previous font seems to have been in use since the fall of 2008. You can see the progression in font use on the main Stanford website below. It appears as though this is the first time the word “University” has been removed from its main page logo, though the Stanford Identity Toolkit has guidance for including the word if desired.





Click image for larger

Update: while Stanford claims that “it cannot be accurately reproduced with any typeface and should not be modified in any way”, I can’t help but imagine that they started with something. Capitolium News 2 Regular, seen below in gray and behind the actual signature, seems like a good start.





The article previously misstated that the font was Source Sans Pro. Source Sans Pro is suggested as a font to use alongside the signature, but the font of the logo itself is what Stanford calls a “uniquely drawn set of typographic characters“.