On May 27, KAIST held a third public hearing for the new school logo candidates. Design Park, the company selected to design the new logo, provides a wide range of services, including naming new companies and creating new logos for companies and schools. It has been working on creating KAIST’s school logo for the past 10 months, after a campus-wide survey revealed that more than half of the campus population wanted a new logo that can represent KAIST’s brand value. The current KAIST logo was said to be “static” and “too complex.” However, the past candidates were met by dissatisfaction from KAIST students, who claimed that the candidates were too similar to the current logo and lacked the simplicity the students wanted. After consulting with the professional designers, the school and the company selected two candidates for the new logo, for which the public hearing was held.

Design Park’s survey asked Koreans around the country for the first word that came into their minds when they hear about KAIST. Results showed that 56% of the people considered KAIST as an institute of intelligence and technology. However, as 58.6% of the people did not know KAIST’s motives and role in our society, Design Park wanted to incorporate KAIST’s core values, creativity and challenge, and differentiate KAIST from other science- and technology-based colleges, such as POSTECH.

With the core values and distinct brand value of KAIST in mind, Jongwon Jeong, the representative for Design Park went on to introduce the trend shifts in logos of different companies and universities around the world. Nowadays, companies and universities are shifting from logos that consist of phrases and texts to those that focus on simplicity with letters or symbols of their identity. Design Park also explained that their new candidates were designed based on the past public hearing’s complaints and incorporated only capital letters to make the logo seem sharper.

After a brief introduction of the history, values, and effort that was put into the design of the new logo, the new and improved candidates were revealed. Jeong took questions and opinions from the audience, but the audience did not seem to be satisfied. Many pointed out the limited use of candidate A because the letter “I” was too difficult to see. Others claimed that candidate B seemed to be disjointed, like a separated piece of work instead of a single concise logo. Jeong explained that the company had conducted surveys and reflected the opinions of a large number of professionals, and the two candidates were chosen as the most popular ones out of the hundreds that they had in mind.

   KAIST is planning to conduct yet another survey from 6 p.m. on May 27 to 12 p.m. on May 30 on the two candidates to see what the rest of the school thinks of the new candidates.