By now you’ve probably noticed Seattle Pacific’s new look, and the new messages accompanying the visuals.
With this new brand, the University highlights how faith, academics, and Seattle coalesce at SPU to create a distinctive experience.
The University Communications office, which publishes Response and most other campus communication materials, spent the last few years researching ideas that would become the backbone of the new brand. Through careful industry research and discussions with current and prospective students, prospective parents, faculty, staff, and alumni, the office and an outside agency crafted a new look and messaging to better portray the University’s mission to a rapidly changing 21st century audience.
The three themes of the new brand highlight SPU’s faith identity, its focus on academic excellence, and the opportunity afforded by the University’s Seattle location.
The new messages highlight core aspects of Seattle Pacific’s identity — things that have always been important, but that will be emphasized even more in the future. The three themes of the new brand highlight SPU’s faith identity, its focus on academic excellence, and the opportunity afforded by the University’s Seattle location.
High-quality academics are, of course, integral to the University’s higher-education mission, and SPU encourages these through a range of programs with opportunities for students to experience real-world impact through internships and research projects.
Students are challenged in the classroom by small class sizes, close relationships with professors, and learning opportunities with other students. The University’s commitment to excellence in learning is reflected in its U.S. News & World Report ranking as a “best national university” — a ranking based partly on the groundbreaking research produced by SPU scholars.
The Seattle location provides a real-world forum of promise and challenge. In Seattle, students put their learning into practice through internships and jobs with some of the country’s top companies. They also engage with the socioeconomic disparities and other challenges of living and working in a contemporary, fast-growing city. This city challenges students to broaden their faith and education in new contexts and to see self and others with compassion as they encounter the deep needs of their communities. The University’s active alumni network in the city and beyond models ways to compassionately engage with the shortcomings and potential inherent to city living.
Seattle Pacific’s commitment to Christian faith ties these threads together, providing a firm foundation for students to develop lifestyles of confident generosity and charitable leadership. Students are supported and encouraged as they deepen their Christian faith or explore it for the first time. The Seattle Pacific community is motivated by the gospel message of Christ’s reconciliation of all things — a message of commitment to justice, mercy, and the good of all.
These three key messages will shape future University communication to community members. The new brand reflects years of deep discussion among faculty and staff across campus about what makes Seattle Pacific uniquely Christian today.
With it, the University can live into that identity for the future, advancing the goal of preparing students to serve a world that needs their talents.
This article originally appeared on page 6 of the autumn issue of Response with the headline, “Bringing SPU’s mission into the future.”
Watch SPU’s initials form the flame:
