News Article

CNA unveils new logo


6/19/2009 11:43:41 AM


College of the North Atlantic President Jean Madill unveiled the institution’s new logo on Friday morning. The college held unveiling ceremonies at all 17 campuses throughout the province simultaneously.

College of the North Atlantic unveiled a new logo today, ushering in a new era for the province’s public college.

The new mark – the letters N and A symbolically depicted as a pair of overlapping waves with the college’s name below – better reflects the modern, high quality institution that CNA has become, while retaining the province’s connection to the sea.

“The province’s public college system has seen many changes in its 40-plus year history,” says Jean Madill, president of CNA. “We have grown and evolved and are now to a point where the old logo was not able to keep pace with our new visual identity. The new logo complements the brand we have been developing and tells potential students and employees that we are a modern, forward thinking institution, and that we are well underway with our transformation from being a good college to becoming a great college.”

The college’s Manager of Marketing and Communications, Stephen Lee, expects the new mark to pay immediate dividends and says the process of creation and implementation was surprisingly cost-effective.

“I think the new logo is fantastic and will do much to help us project a modern image,” says Lee. “But one of the first concerns people express when a college or university – especially a publicly funded college or university – changes its logo is how the money spent on the change should have been put toward facilities or equipment. The truth is, in our case at least, there was very little cost associated with our new logo project.”

While some institutions spend hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring consultants and marketing firms when creating new visual identities, Lee says all the college’s branding and logo development was done in-house with a very talented team of graphic artists and marketers – many of whom are college alumni.

“Most everyone in our department is a graduate of CNA,” says Lee. “So this speaks volumes about the quality of training they received at this college. When creating the new logo we also involved the faculty and students from our graphic design program and solicited input from current students, faculty and staff, high school students, industry partners and alumni – it was a very thorough, inclusive process and I think the results reflect that.”

Corinne Dunne, the CNA’s Vice-President of Development and College Advancement, says the college’s current visual identity has been created over a number of years and the new logo is the final piece of the revised brand. She also says the college plans to carry out most of the transition from old logo to new over the course of a year, again resulting in very little actual cost being associated with the change.

“Being publicly funded we are very aware of how we spend our dollars, and our priority is to ensure our programs are well resourced and the services we provide to students are of the highest quality,” she says. “We have 17 campuses and more than 100 programs, so at the end of the day, even though we felt this change was absolutely necessary, we knew we would only move forward if we could do so in a cost-effective manner.”

College of the North Atlantic is also very environmentally conscious, and did not want to be in a situation whereby paper materials such as brochures, were being wasted.

“Obviously we knew this change was coming for some time, so we were able to plan for it,” says President Madill. “For instance, we only print enough brochures for one year at a time, so the new ones being printed for this year will incorporate the new logo. We delayed putting graphics on the new vehicles in our fleet so we wouldn’t have to change those. We began ordering promotional items that only had our acronym of CNA or our web address on them, so they don’t have to be changed… the only thing we have to change is the logo on the signs outside our campuses as those are only replaced every eight years or so. There may also be some internal signage as well, but again the cost would be minimal.”

And Lee points out any additional costs associated with changing the logo will likely be recouped though the benefits of having the new mark.

“Besides helping us in the marketplace and creating a more positive image with potential students, the new logo is so much easier to use from a technical perspective,” says Lee. “Our old logo had a lot of technical faults that resulted in our spending more when purchasing advertising. As well, we lost a lot of value due to vendors and partners using the logo incorrectly.”

While the new logo will immediately start to appear on college materials, it won’t come into official use until September. Madill says this decision was made due to the feedback from the student body.

“We had a number of graduating students say they wanted to finish their education with the old logo,” she says. “So in a sense, the old logo will graduate with them as part of the Class of 2009. The new logo will start with the intake of students for this coming academic year, so the Class of 2010 will have the distinction of being the first to graduate with the new logo.”

The college’s campus in Qatar intends to convert to using a version of the new logo modified slightly for the Middle East, but at a later date.

More information about the college’s new logo or about programs that still have seats available for September can be found on CNA’s website at www.cna.nl.ca.

-30-



For more information contact:

Stephen Lee
Manager of Marketing and Communications
College of the North Atlantic
709-643-7721
stephen.lee@cna.nl.ca