Decoding the Colorado State University Logo Colors: A Comprehensive Guide

Visual communication relies heavily on color. Color is a powerful tool that can be used to persuade and influence. This article explores the strategic use of color, particularly focusing on how it applies to Colorado State University (CSU) brand colors and brand identity.

The Power of Color in Branding

Color is more than just a visual element; it's a powerful force that evokes emotions and associations. In the context of branding, color helps to shape perceptions, communicate values, and create a memorable identity. For institutions like CSU, a consistent and strategic use of color is crucial for reinforcing its brand and connecting with its audience.

CSU's Core Brand Colors: Green and Gold

CSU's core brand colors are green and gold. The color green represents balance, harmony, growth, nature, freshness, and healing. The color yellow brings feelings of warmth, creativity, joy, clarity, energy, and happiness. Yellow’s dazzling cousin, gold, conveys success, triumph, and abundance.

These meanings can all be tied back to themes around CSU’s personality. Innovation aligns with both creativity and success, feelings that are associated with warmer tones like orange and yellow. Sustainability is also associated with the color green. Green’s representation of harmony and growth can directly inform how you thematically plan content.

The Ram's Head: A Visual Representation of CSU

In tandem with the CSU Signature, the Ram’s Head Symbol is Colorado State University’s primary mark. While it can be used as a standalone element, it should always be used with the CSU Signature or a Unit ID where possible.

Read also: The CPB Logo: A Visual History

The image shows the suggested ratio of colors found in the Ram’s head when designing assets for CSU. Green dominates while white is secondary. Gold serves as an accent color to provide additional depth.

Color Codes for Colorado State Rams

The Colorado State Rams colors are green and gold. The Colorado State Rams team colors in Hex, RGB, and CMYK can be found below:

Green: Pantone: PMS 357 C, Hex Color: #1E4D2B, RGB: (30, 77, 43), CMYK: (92, 18, 94, 61).

Institutional Brand Identity: A Process of Rebirth

Institutional brand identity is currently in a process of rebirth. CSU recently collaborated with Carnegie Dartlett, a higher education marketing agency. Those conversations identified a key personality archetype for CSU: Innovator. CSU is also considered as a leading research university, especially in fields like atmospheric science, infectious disease, clean energy, and environmental science. CSU is also a global leader in sustainability initiatives.

Color Palette for the Innovator

So what color palette works best for the Innovator? What about science and research? Well, it depends on the emotional intent. If the video’s intent is to bring about feelings of awe through stimulating themes like leadership and innovation, warmer colors may be effective. Warmer tones convey messages of energy and excitement. They’re “active” colors, in other words, they’re stimulating. If the video’s intent is to build trust or curiosity, cooler tones can help with that. Cool colors, like blue and green, can be calming and relaxing. These colors also create a sense of harmony. When your audience is relaxed, it’s easier to take in new ideas like scientific discoveries.

Balancing Warm and Cool Tones

Balance is key. Overpowering scenes with warm tones, especially if the saturation is cranked up, can feel chaotic and harsh. There’s an 80/20 rule and a 60-30-10 rule. If you’re focusing on warm colors, use 80% warm hues and 20% cool hues. The 60-30-10 rule is often used in graphic design. Let’s use a triadic color scheme as an example. We’ll go with red as the primary, yellow as the secondary, and blue as the accent. Red would make up 60% of the image, yellow at 30%, and blue at 10%. You can make your own choices on what’s primary, secondary, or an accent.

Read also: The History of College Cup

Applying Color to Visual Content

Oftentimes, a company’s logo or brand colors transfer to their video content. For instance, Apple’s logo is often seen in neutral gray or silver. Their product videos have a color palette that is neutral, yet sleek and sophisticated. Colorado State University’s colors, green and gold, always make their way into visual content as well.

Experiment with color schemes revolving around green and yellow. Explore different shades of each or their nearby colors on the color wheel. Find and use their complementary colors for contrast, which lay on the opposite end of the color wheel.

Maintaining Natural Skin Tones

One of the important things to keep in mind is most of content is not experimental or narrative film. Always ensure that skin tones stay natural. It’s good to tweak colors a bit so it has more of a cinematic touch, but most of content isn’t too far of a stretch from true colors.

Balancing Colors with Neutrals

Always balance colors with neutral colors. These include blacks, whites, grays and browns. The more colors you modify or work with, the more difficult it is to make them work together. Be picky about your palette. Don’t bump up the saturation for all the colors in your scene. Not every color needs to be a star. Only one or two should stand out, while the rest support that color and give it rhythm in the background. A color’s lightness, or luminance, can be more important than the color itself. There needs to be contrast between both colors (like complementary colors) and luminance. Find a look that works for most projects and stick to it.

The College of Liberal Arts Color Palette

The College of Liberal Arts has a palette of accent colors that complement the University’s core colors of CSU Green, CSU Gold, and White. It is important that departments follow the color guidelines below so they maintain the college brand, follow color accessibility standards, and provide a consistent visual experience for audiences. The University launched a new Find Your Energy brand in Fall 2023 and created a FYE CLA Brand in 2025.

Understanding RGB and PMS

RGB (red, green, blue) is a coding method to tell computers how to display color digitally. Pantone Management System (PMS) is a library of colors for printed materials.

Accent Colors for CLA

The accent colors below are unique to the College of Liberal Arts. Designed to be complementary to the primary University colors, these options are available to give CLA and its departments and units the ability to stand out from others on campus. With such a large palette of accent colors to work with, it is easy to select color combinations for foreground (text) and background colors, and colors to convey meaning, that have enough contrast to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA requirement.

Color Accessibility

Color accessibility is key to creating a brand that is welcoming to all regardless of abilities. Pairings of background colors and type colors ensure messaging is legible. These are preferred pairings of background color and type color. If a pairing is labeled with AA18, it should be used at large type sizes only (we recommend 18pt regular or 14pt bold, but no smaller).

UCCS Colors

The official UCCS colors are black and gold. Color can strategically organize information, elevate the impact of a piece, and provide visual cohesion between various products. It is highlight color, and can draw the audience's attention to the most important two or three elements. It can pop as gold text on a black background, or be used sparingly as a background color with black text. On a handheld piece such as a brochure or postcard with more body text, white backgrounds are generally preferred, and colors such as CU Gold are effective when used to highlight a headline, call out important information, or differentiate a graphic.

Prioritizing Legibility

Legibility should always be prioritized. Tertiary and Other Colors should generally only be used as small pops of color within otherwise UCCS-branded materials, where black and gold are prominent, and other colors are used sparingly, to convey a specific meaning or information hierarchy. In general, gold text works best on black backgrounds, and is less legible or accessible on white backgrounds if too small. When using gold text on a white background, prefer large font size and bold weights. White text on gold background generally also lack enough contrast for legibility and accessibility, unless large and bold.

CU Colors

Units are encouraged to be creative with CU’s official color palette (gold, black, dark gray, light gray). It should be the dominant in all applications, but units can work with the UCCS Brand and Design office to explore varying shades, gradient, texture and depth of the CU color palette. While tints and shades of the CU colors can be used sparingly, we encourage you to work with the UCCS brand manager to ensure uses support the UCCS brand, such as avoiding uses of pale beige or tints of CU Gold that appear too brown or too green.

Tertiary Colors at UCCS

The subtle use of tertiary colors in digital and print publications is acceptable within limits. Units should avoid the prominent use of colors that are closely associated with other universities (eg. Green - Colorado State University; red - University of Nebraska). This does not mean those colors cannot be used, only that they should not be the dominant color. Tertiary colors should appear only as small pops of color within otherwise UCCS-branded materials, where black and gold are prominent. Use tertiary colors in content, not to establish a visual sub-identity. Tertiary colors should be complimentary and used sparingly, specifically to direct attention or highlight important information.

The CSU System Logo

The Colorado State University System unveiled a new logo that visually represents the distinct brand of each of its three campuses, and showcases the strength of the campuses being part of the same university system. The new CSU System logo incorporates one color from each of the System’s campuses - gold from CSU; blue from CSU Pueblo; and maroon from CSU Global - representing the uniqueness of each campus and the strength of their connection.

Find Your Energy Brand

We are excited to launch CSU's new Find Your Energy brand! Our brand is not our logo, advertising campaign, identity system, or set of talking points. Our brand is the stories, experiences, and attributes that define Colorado State University. It is the sum of all the interactions our audience - students, alumni, fans, community members - has with CSU. It is the feeling we leave them with. It is what they say about us to their friends.

Over time, the University’s visual symbols and aesthetics become symbolic of the brand. While they are not the brand, they serve as a shorthand, evoking memories of audiences’ emotional bonds.

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