The UC Davis Aggies are the intercollegiate athletic teams of the University of California, Davis. The university’s visual identity centers on a mustang, a campus mascot dating to the 1920s, which was formalized into a consistent family of athletic marks in 1999.
Design and History
The horse symbol at UC Davis dates back to 1921 and a stud Thoroughbred named Gunrock, who supplied stock for the U.S. Army and gave rise to the identity mark the university used in various forms over the following decades. In 1998, UC Davis set out for the first time to create a consistent logo set to support its NCAA sports programs. A year later, after extensive design work and collaboration, the university rolled out the official family of athletic marks that still stand today. Four years after that, students voted to choose “Gunrock” as the official university mascot and ambassador. [1]
The 1999 redesign was developed by SME Design (now SME Branding), a New York brand-marketing firm that had designed logos for numerous colleges, corporations and professional sports teams. The firm concluded a year-long, campus-wide image study that resulted in a family of marks. [2] [3] The white wild horse was drawn to symbolize the qualities that students, faculty, staff and alumni said best describe UC Davis, including dignity, class, strength, pride, quality, honesty, tradition, teamwork and being on the cutting edge. [4] [5]
Before the 1999 unified system, UC Davis teams used a variety of marks. The most notable predecessor was the comet-tail CA, which first appeared on the baseball uniform in 1958, replacing a thematically similar interlocking CA. That logo remained the baseball team’s cap logo until 1999. The most common CA logo for athletics branding featured a block C enclosing a horse’s head and three wheat stalks, a nod to the mustang symbol of the university and its agricultural roots. [3]
In 2018, the baseball team reinstated the comet-tail CA on its caps, and that summer the mark became an official logo for the athletics department, licensed and branded on uniforms and gear for all sports. The two-letter symbol is now an official secondary mark for the Aggies. [3]
Meaning and Symbolism
The 1999 primary mark depicts a mustang’s head inside a horseshoe-shaped letter C, representing the University of California. [6] The C-horse logo, as it is known, remains a UC Davis Athletics mark. [6] The mustang symbol connects to the university’s agricultural roots, and the CA letters themselves represent the early history of the institution, which began as the University Farm and later became the Branch of the College of Agriculture. The appellation “California Aggies,” or “Cal Aggies,” surfaced around 1922, replacing the “Davis Farmers” nickname. [3]
Typography and Design
The 1999 logo family uses the campus colors of blue and gold. [4] The typeface used in the lettering is a campus trademark. [4] UC Davis holds the license for use of the marks. [4]
UC Davis Athletics maintains a branding guide that governs logo usage, and all vendors producing merchandise bearing UC Davis trademarks must be licensed through the Collegiate Licensing Company. [7]
Logo Index is an independent educational archive covering logos, visual identities and graphic design history. All trademarks and brand assets remain the property of their respective owners.
