Do you want to order pens or T-shirts with a Johns Hopkins logo for a conference? Are you looking for a JHU-themed background for Zoom or a PowerPoint presentation? Perhaps you're looking for the Peabody shield to use on social media or a School of Public Health email signature. Or maybe you want to download a Hopkins pattern for a flyer, need to find out what JHU's primary colors are (Heritage Blue and Spirit Blue), or wonder if you should capitalize board of trustees (no). Now, every Johns Hopkins University employee has access to all these resources (and many more) at their fingertips on the newly launched brand guidelines website: brand.jhu.edu.
The goal of the new brand website is to make it easy to make great work. The site is intended to be a resource not only for the Hopkins community of faculty, staff, and students but also for partners, vendors, and any other stakeholders who work with the many divisions, groups, and initiatives associated with the university.
The website covers far more than logos and colors because brand is much more than an institution's visual identity. Brand also encompasses the tone and voice of communications and marketing materials, from copy on a landing page or brochure to the emojis included in an Instagram post. There is even such a thing as a brand's sound identity, and just last year, JHU debuted a suite of styles with a signature mneumonic. Any employee looking for intro music to a podcast or video can download official brand music from the website.
While the brand guidelines website has been years in the making, a big push was made by three employees in the Office of University Communications to launch the new site ahead of the upcoming sesquicentennial anniversary of Johns Hopkins in 2026: Marina Cooper, Abby Jackson, and Beth Fritzinger.
Johns Hopkins is considered one of the most trusted brands in the world. "It's our shared responsibility to uphold and protect it," says Marina Cooper, senior associate vice president for integrated marketing and brand at JHU. "Brand standards are no longer for designers only. They must be for everyone," she says. "We view everyone within the Hopkins community as a brand ambassador. As we communicate with internal or external audiences to share our research, discoveries, and more, we want our Hopkins community to be able to leverage the great brand equity of this nearly 150-year-old institution."
Making it easy to make great work
Maintaining and leveraging trust in the Hopkins brand was the guiding principle behind the new brand guidelines website. "Our mantra is, make it easy for people to do the right thing," Cooper says. "We want to remove the barriers to making great work, visually and verbally."
Under Cooper's vision and guidance, Abby Jackson, director of Creative Strategy, and Beth Fritzinger, brand manager, led the charge to create a visually rich, easy-to-use website that empowers the university community with the guidance and resources necessary to create consistent and high-quality communications. Jackson notes that it's a testament to JHU's commitment to its brand that all three positions in University Communications—Cooper's, Fritzinger's, and Jackson's—are inaugural roles. While Cooper joined JHU in 2020 and Fritzinger in 2023, Jackson has worked for Hopkins for 18-plus years, first at Johns Hopkins Medicine, then at Carey Business School, before taking on her current role in 2021.
The new brand website is a revamp of the previous one, which Cooper describes as having been "mostly a wall of words." While designers could find what they needed, it was not user-friendly for most people, Fritzinger says. "We noticed that the website previously had a lot of gaps in content, and it didn't have a lot of in-use examples." A focus of the website redesign was addressing gaps in a way that would show and tell. To that end, the new website has 500-plus images and assets in the Download Library and across the site, including dos and don'ts and many examples of successful use cases.
With her long history of working for different divisions of Hopkins, Jackson has a special perspective on the brand guidelines project. She notes that in 2013 Hopkins undertook a major effort to unify its logo system. "That was a huge feat to get all the schools on board," she says. Since the focus was on logos, some of the other elements of brand—such as messaging and merchandise guidelines, mission statements, and other things that most major entities have as part of their brand identity—were not fleshed out at that time, she notes. "So, over the last few years, we've been really trying to fill in the brand tool kit." Making sure everything is "scalable and future-proof" is also important, she emphasizes. JHU is growing all the time, and the brand guidelines need to grow with it.
Who is the brand website for?
As Cooper notes, the brand guidelines website is not just for designers. "The target audience is communicators across the university, and that includes marketing professionals, designers, media specialists, and more," Fritzinger says. "We try to have resources for everyone."
Here are a few specific examples of who will find what they need on the new website:
Anyone ordering merchandise. On the menu bar at the top of the website, you'll see Applying the Brand. In the dropdown menu underneath, you'll find the new Promo Items & Merchandise page. "This is one of those pages that's for everyone," Fritzinger says. Whether you're ordering promotional items for a giveaway within your department, or you're ordering branded merchandise for students or the general community for an athletic event, this is the place to start.
Image caption: Beth Fritzinger and Abby Jackson celebrate the launch of brand.jhu.edu with a selfie.
This page walks users through the merchandise design process as well as ordering and licensing guidelines. "If you're ordering merchandise and paying for it with Johns Hopkins University funds, or if it includes reference to Johns Hopkins University, it needs to be produced by a licensed vendor," Fritzinger says. The licensed vendor list includes local, alumni, and national vendors. And it's worth noting that even when it comes to swag, sustainability matters to the university. "We encourage useful, sustainable products," she says.
Schools or centers partnering on co-branded initiatives. A lot of the work that happens at JHU is interdisciplinary. For example, two schools may host an event together. In the Visual Identity section, the website introduces co-branding guidance that covers how to represent both entities under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins University brand.
Anyone giving presentations. Whether faculty or staff members are looking for a customized PowerPoint or report template, an email signature, or a branded Zoom background, they will find it under Resources. That's also where to find one of the most popular pages of the brand website: the Download Library. If you're looking for icons, shields, or stock photos, you'll find them here, too, along with JHU's new sound identity package, the official brand music collection to be used for video and audio productions.
Anyone looking for inspiration or examples of branding in action. Another important part of the new website is the Brand Showcase. This page shows off finished works representing the Johns Hopkins University brand across platforms, audiences, missions, campaigns, and more. "People are encouraged to submit their projects on a regular basis, to keep this as a living showcase of all of our best work," Fritzinger says.
As Jackson likes to describe it, "Brand is a promise. When you see that Hopkins name, we've made a commitment to our audience that it's going to be high quality, it's going to be factual, it's going to be truth. Brand is constantly delivering on that promise, and that's why we have guidelines around it."
For any JHU staff members who are interested in doing a deeper dive on branding and gain a better understanding of the guidelines, Fritzinger will be leading regular Brand 101 virtual training sessions. The first session will be held Oct. 16 and, owing to overwhelming demand, two additional sessions will be held this fall, on Nov. 6 and Nov. 20. Learn more and register here.
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