University of California Logo.....terrible?

Most university logos (or seals as they prefer to call them) are pretty bland. They consist of a circle, an arching name of the school, the year of establishment, and then some quasi-inspirational saying, promoting knowledge and success. University of California meets all these university seal quotes with flying colors, and is hard to distinguish from other universities. Sometimes a school will need to get with the times and create a new unique logo to help distinguish itself from the crowd of other schools yammering for students money. They didn't go about it too well.

The new logo doesn't look horrendously, offensively bad, but as a logo for a school it doesn't really instill a sense of pride per se. I get what they were going for too. The U is the large blue area behind the  off-putting C shaped gradient, and it also doubles as an open book (check out the top of it, it's actually pretty neat). The C is where something went wrong, and I can see why people would be offended having this as the official seal of a school. The gradient just doesn't look right, and looks sloppy. It would;ve been much more effective if it was left just as a normal yellow C minus the gradient, and maybe even permissible, but this is the one huge glaring flaw of the new logo, and it sold the taste of the rest of it.

Something that could've worked better for the new logo would've been to take elements from the old and polish them or make them break out of the tropey feel of the seal. Like a star above the book shape of the U, and keeping the scroll of Let the be Light, or even adding that saying somewhere into the new one....I mean really, don't scrap every little thing from an old logo unless the old one made people hate it.