While the university rebrands itself with the recent launch of a new university logo, the athletic department is not far behind.
Vice President of Strategic Communications and Development Christopher Wells, along with the coaches of the athletic department, are working to create a new logo to bring consistency to what each university sports team wears.
In order to establish a unified rhetoric of how athletics are being represented, Wells began floating ideas to the department during the summer, which initiated a conversation and the start of an intricate process.
"Coaches have real idiosyncratic needs for logos, not just on uniforms, but for lots of different scales," Wells said. "There are very specific sorts of manufacturing details that limit the amount of complexity you can use in small scales."
Wells used the DePauw swim teams as an example of the difficulty in discovering the right logo that every team can use. Not only does the logo have to be practical and work for each team, it has to be well received by the coaches and a small group of players.
"If it's going to be on the uniform we're wearing, I'd like to have an opinion because we have to pay for the T-shirt and stuff we wear," said junior softball player Jamie Story. "I'd really like to have it look nice because we represent DePauw athletics. This process is something that we want to be a part of."
Wells said he's looking for a viable representation of the athletic department similar to other institutions. Wabash College has a single "W" for their logo, which is undebatable when it comes to deciding what appears on uniforms and apparel. The "W" logo is used consistently, providing a recognizable trademark for Wabash's athletic program.
Currently, DePauw athletic teams use countless varying logos for uniforms and recruiting materials. While the football team sports a tiger paw as one of their logos, the baseball team relies on the old-english-style "D".
With the development of a new athletic logo, the university is looking to achieve a level of cohesiveness that allows for an identifiable symbol conveying the values of DePauw athletics.
"Although there's an aesthetic quality to logos, there's a functional quality too," Wells said. "We need to have a sort of unified system. When we field teams and put out materials connected to athletics where everyone's got their own sort of look and feel, it's amateurish."
Athletic Director Page Cotton said the DePauw logo will help build a sense of pride that current students and alumni have when they wear apparel associated with the university.
"A logo which says DePauw: I think it's decades and decades of people who have graduated from DePauw and what they represent," Cotton said. "And I'm proud of what that represents. That's why people are passionate about this."
As people associated with the university travel across the country with their athletic clothing, Wells spoke of the need to capture the true characteristic of DePauw.
"Lots of students are touched in one way or another by our athletics program," Wells said. "We believe that we have a strong athletics program. We believe that there's inherent value for the ways that students develop here in their participation in teams. We want to speak what is true and authentic about that experience when you talk to folks who are off-campus, prospective students and their families especially."
Wells hopes a new logo can be decided upon by the end of fall semester. He admits there will be a fair amount of trial and error in the future but says the coordination between him and the athletic department should result in a fair product.
"If you think of the number of ways the athletic department gets our name out to the public, all those things are things that represent DePauw," Cotton said. "The athletic department is an integral part of the university, and we want out student athletes to integrate into the mission statement of the university."
-Ryan Foutty contributed to this article