Board of Directors

Our New Look

September 3, 2015

You might have noticed some changes to The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships’ visual design over the past year. Working closely with the Board of Trustees and Isometric Studio, led by Andy Chen (2010), we began to refresh the look and feel of the Fellowship’s visual identity. The goals were clear: to honor the rich history and tradition that the Fellowship has established and to simultaneously look toward the bright future and promise that immigrants bring to America. Our new logos underscore these dual aims.

The Fellowship’s name forms an elegant rectangle, using a modern font that is based on a 16th-century punch cutter’s typeface. The Trustees were particularly fond of the “boat of books” image that had been associated with the Fellowship, an image that invokes the idea of a journey involving education. Our new compass evokes a similar message, keeping the Fellows on course during their journey. It is filled with a book, much like the icons used by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and countless other institutions of higher education. In our case, the book is empty, allowing the Fellows to write their own narratives along their voyage through life.

We used last year’s newsletter as an opportunity to introduce the Fellowship’s visual identity as a complete system, demonstrating how the new identity can extend beyond the new logo. This year, we are excited about unveiling our new website. More than expressing the Fellowship’s new look, the website promises to tell the stories of the Fellows and the Fellowship, and to enable Fellows to connect with one another with greater ease and flexibility than ever.

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows, Trustees, and staff all worked with web design team P’unk Ave to create a website that accomplishes the same goals as the visual design’s: to acknowledge the prestigious history of The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans while looking toward the Fellowship’s bright future. We hope you enjoy it! ∎