Men’s basketball soars to No. 1 in UAA rankings

dent guards Mitch Prendergast and Danny Frauenheim.

tion during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—, our print product hasn’t changed much. We’ve made small adjustments here and there, but our overall design language dates back to 2013. While that design has served us well in the 2010s, it does not fit the sensibilities of the 2020s. For instance, in

2013, iOS 7 launched with Windows 8, introducing flat visual design to the masses through digital software. There was a turn towards simplicity, minimalism and modernity in most designs—including ours. While we don’t reject those shifts, the new decade gives us an opportunity to reflect on what worked about flat design and what did not. Furthermore, it allows us to reevaluate whether we can take design cues from the past that we had previously discarded.

To do so, we held a campuswide design logo contest, enlisting the best student graphic designers CWRU has to offer. This will always be the newspaper of and for the students, and we wanted to ensure that CWRU students had a voice in this process. We had many great submissions but ultimately went with a design submission from fourthyear computer science student John Mays. In his submission, Mays described his inspiration from software logos of the 1990s and older magazine designs while maintaining a modern simplicity. Mays wanted to create a design “reminiscent of older design attitudes, but original enough to be serviceable and ‘new’ feeling for at least a decade in the future.” We have a long legacy here at CWRU and The Observer—therefore, this marriage of the old and the new fit great with what we were searching for.

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