The Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture was revered, influential, and well overdue for a brand refresh and a new website that better reflected its legacy and student experience. The school tapped Chicago studio Span to lead the rebrand, designing a comprehensive new visual identity anchored by a new logo and website. Two typefaces anchor the new identity, both harkening back to the roots of the school and of modernist architecture in Chicago.
The first of these typefaces is Neue Galerie, a digital revival of van der Rohe’s Allzweck typeface designed by Ralph du Carrois of the German foundry bBox Type. The second, aptly named The Future, is a contemporary homage to Futura by New Zealand’s Klim Type Foundry. As with Mies van der Rohe and his leadership of the school from 1938 to 1958, Futura was essential to the school’s identity in the 1940s.
As for the inspiration for the identity work, the Span team didn’t have to go far. Located in Chicago, the birthplace of modern architecture, Mies van der Rohe led the school for two decades and designed its iconic column-free main building, S.R. Crown Hall (a National Registered Landmark since 2001).
The new identity embodies van der Rohe’s aphorism-turned-philosophy, “less is more.” The type choices, together with the muted palette, grid structure, and refined use of space, evoke the heritage of modernist principles and the history of the IIT College of Architecture, and yet the aesthetic positions the school with a future-forward invitation to the next generation of transformational design minds.
Span partner Bud Rodecker led the development of the visual identity system. The studio is known for its multidisciplinary work in the cultural, arts, and government sectors. You may remember the team’s identity work on Chicago’s newest park, Sanctuary, which we covered back in August 2024. Span has even rebranded an invasive fish species—Asian carp is now known as Copi—to entice the entire food chain to reconsider it as worth buying, cooking, and serving before it destroys the Great Lakes.
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