The students were pondering just what sort of owl Florida Atlantic University is, or wants to be.
Was a logo showing an owl in flight too “cute and fuzzy,” as graduate student Amber Stein put it? Was the design with a perched bird too frightening, with its red eyes and spread wings? Was a sleek, stylized owl head too limiting?
So it goes as 40-year-old FAU tries to groom its image. The university is spending $50,000 to streamline and update its logos, on the theory that an institution bent on gaining academic and athletic recognition ought to be more easily recognizable. FAU describes it as corporate-style “branding,” with focus groups to match.
Students, professors, staffers and supporters weighed in last week on three options for an owl logo for team uniforms and merchandise, as well as three other choices for a more sedate institutional symbol for brochures, letterhead and the like. One final design for each will be unveiled in January, after some further work by a campus committee and Ohio-based graphics consultant Eric Rickabaugh.
The new look is intended to represent “a firm grasp on the tradition of the university, what the university stands for and what direction the university wants to head in,” spokeswoman Aileen Izquierdo says.
To student Lawrence “Beau” Lavender, that means a design that merges a semi-abstract wave and flame to form an institutional symbol. Both are elements in FAU’s current seal.
“It’s more artistic. It’s more futuristic … It doesn’t look like something from the ’60s,” Lavender, the president of FAU’s ice hockey club, offered at a student and staff focus group this week. A growing university, he reasoned, “should have a [symbol] that reflects the future, something that’s state-of-the-art.”
But to Stein, a simple “FAU,” with a wave curling through the “A,” says it best.
“The whole reason I came [to FAU] was because it was Boca and because it was near the water,” said Stein, who moved from Pittsburgh to pursue a graduate degree in communications.
Opinions were no less split on the owl, a reference — if one that bears little resemblance — to the burrowing owls that inhabit FAU’s main campus here.
Some admired the clean, striking style of an owl head attached to a winged FAU — “definitely something I could see on a football helmet,” freshman Eric Yesner said. But others liked the perched owl’s ferociously alert look.
“Intimidating,” admissions-office staffer Ashia Milligan said approvingly.
Jennifer Peltz can be reached at or 561-243-6636.
