University of Sydney
MAUD, 2015
The University of Sydney was founded in 1850 on a genuinely radical idea. That higher education should be open to all, regardless of gender, background or means. It was the first university in Australia to admit women. The first to open its doors to students of diverse backgrounds. Progressive not as a posture but as a founding principle, written into the institution before the word had currency.
Somewhere along the way, that story had been lost. The sandstone cloisters remained, beautiful, weighty, impossible to ignore; but they had come to define the university's perception entirely. An institution valued for its architecture more than its ideas. Prestigious but remote. Historic but not vital. Eclipsed by peers who had done the harder work of articulating what they stood for and what they were building toward.
The brief was to recover what had always been true. Not to invent a new University of Sydney but to surface the one that had existed from the beginning, intellectually restless, genuinely open, defined by the rigour and energy of the debate and inquiry that continue to animate its halls, auditoriums and laboratories every single day.
The identity that emerged honours the heritage without being imprisoned by it. It carries the weight of 170 years of academic life while speaking with the confidence and conviction of an institution that knows exactly what it believes and why it matters.
Completed while Senior Designer at MAUD, alongside Adam Vella and Camilla Belton.
Photography by Irenaeus Herok. Original logo drawn by MOON Communications.
Photography by Irenaeus Herok. Original logo drawn by MOON Communications.