GW Releases New Brand Guidelines

The George Washington University has introduced a new set of brand guidelines designed to help communicators across the institution tell a cohesive and compelling story about GW.

As part of the refreshed brand introduced in December with extensive community input, the new guidelines will serve as a roadmap for how the university presents itself by providing shared language and visual standards that departments, schools and offices can use when communicating with audiences on campus and beyond.

They outline how the university's brand strategy, voice and creative expression work together to shape the GW brand. In particular, the guidelines stress the importance of GW's brand promise of "Proximity and Progress" in shaping how the university communicates to various audiences. The "Proximity and Progress" brand promise highlights the university's location in the heart of Washington, D.C., and the opportunities GW creates for students, faculty and researchers, connecting knowledge with action to affect meaningful change.

The goal is to ensure that all GW's communications and marketing efforts-from news stories and marketing materials to social media posts and presentations-consistently reflect the same core ideas about the university and its impact.

"We're excited to share these guidelines with the GW community, which give us a shared roadmap for how we express who we are and the impact we have," said Ellen Moran, vice president for communications and marketing. "Now the real work begins of collaborating across the university to help communicators use these tools so that together we continue to tell a clear and cohesive story about GW."

The brand guidelines define four key pillars that anchor GW's storytelling: the university's location in the nation's capital, its commitment to engaged scholarship, the meaningful outcomes achieved by its community and its broader impact in the world.

These ideas help communicators frame stories about the university in ways that connect individual achievements, such as student research projects, faculty breakthroughs or alumni accomplishments, to a larger narrative about GW's role as an intellectual hub and catalyst for progress.

In addition, the guidelines introduce visual standards and graphic elements that will help unify the university's look and feel across platforms. The guidelines detail typography, a refreshed color palette and photography style that can be used across channels.

The guidelines will be available on the updated websitefor the Office of Communications and Marketing (OCM). OCM has also released several templates that GW community members can download, including new PowerPoint templates, Zoom backgrounds and community email header designs.

GW Introduces Refreshed Brand Highlighting Proximity and Progress