Pitt gets a new look
Uniform colors weren’t the first thing Heather Lyke heard about when she was hired as Pitt’s Athletic Director in the spring of 2017.
They were second.
“I think the stadium came up first; then the colors,” Lyke joked Sunday after Pitt unveiled its largest rebranding effort in more than 20 years. Finally and permanently gone are navy and gold, replaced by a blue and yellow that is far closer to the colors introduced by Johnny Majors in the early 1970’s.
The move was preceded by two years of “retro” uniforms that were used throughout the Athletic Department, most prominently by the football team, which has worn both home and road versions over the last two seasons.
For Lyke, dropping the navy and gold in favor of something with more history at Pitt - not to mention something brighter - became a priority when she attended her first meeting of ACC athletic directors and she found herself sitting between representatives from Georgia Tech and Notre Dame.
“I looked at our name tags and it looked pretty much interchangeable because our colors were so identical. I really thought, ‘How are we going to be unique? How are we going to stand out in the ACC? How are we going to distinguish ourselves from a looks standpoint and then obviously from a competitive standpoint?’”
To find an answer, Lyke took the questions to representatives from Nike in June of 2017. The company’s Global Identity Group spent several days on campus, talking to people throughout the University and studying what makes Pitt.
Almost immediately, the centerpiece of campus - the Cathedral of Learning - became the centerpiece of the rebranding campaign.
“When we saw that,’ said Sean Butterly, who was Nike’s art director on the project, “being visual people, we knew instantly that was something that we wanted to incorporate in every part of the branding system. So it really started with that as a foundation concept and story and we just built from there: how does it come to life through the Panther head, through the numbers, through the fonts, all of those kinds of things.”
The featured Cathedral inspiration is in the numbers, which appear in “Cathedral font” - created for Pitt’s uniforms and adding pointed arches to the tops of the numbers. The Cathedral was part of the design of the numbers on Pitt’s previous uniforms, but in those instances, the arching was inside the numbers, which were still generally rounded. Now the arching is the top of the numbers, bringing curved numbers to a point.
The Cathedral also inspired another major change to Pitt’s branding in the form of a secondary logo. Gone is the so-called “Dinocat,” the sharp-lined Panther logo introduced with the last major rebrand in 1997. In its place is a new Panther logo that resembles the fountainhead on the front of the Cathedral.
“We went through several rounds and iterations,” Butterly said. “What it ended up being was a reflection of the statues all around campus, but the main point of inspiration was the fountainhead at the front of the Cathedral. It made perfect sense because that’s the first thing you see as you walk into the Cathedral.”
The new Panther logo certainly has one big fan in football coach Pat Narduzzi.
“I think everybody identifies us with the Pitt script right now after a couple years…it’s the identity of that Panther right now is the biggest thing I look at that Pitt needed bad,” Narduzzi said Sunday. “We need that secondary logo to go with that script. It’s a mean-looking Panther, too, so you better watch out.”
“I think they really nailed it,” Lyke said. “They came and studied the University of Pittsburgh. They spent about three or four days on campus. A lot of the inspiration is behind the Cathedral of Learning. I think that’s what is so meaningful and there’s a lot of depth to the design; it’s not just a new Panther head.”
Butterly added that linking the number fonts, which are even incorporated in the “H2P” logo that appears on the uniforms, to the Panther head logo, was important in the process of creating something Pitt hasn’t really had for the better part of the last 20 years:
A single, consistent and recognizable brand.
“Our goal is to build a really cohesive system, so whether someone sees the numbers, whether they see the font, whether they see the mascot, it all looks like it comes from the same place visually,” Butterly said. “That’s only going to make their brand stronger because every element looks like it belongs as part of the system. So they know instantly, whether it’s the numbers or the Panther head, ‘Oh, that’s Pitt. It belongs to Pitt.’”