SWE has worked hard over its 69 years to develop an identity that connects with a wide range of individuals and organizations. Brand consistency across all SWE sections, affiliates and affinity groups is essential to supporting and delivering SWE’s brand promise to women in engineering across the globe. It is important that all our leaders and brand representatives attend this event to ensure the visual representation of SWE is consistent across all channels, so make sure to get familiar with our SWE Brand Guidelines!
Here’s how SWE’s brand guidelines (which can be found here) define a brand:
So why do we want to use the SWE brand correctly? Because a brand for a company, organization, or society is representative of that group, just like a resume is representative of you as an engineer at a career fair. Your resume is a summary of everything you have done in your life relating to that engineering job you want – your project experience, work experience, grades, and extracurricular activities, that all add up to you being a great candidate. How would you feel about someone parading around a resume with your name on it but a lower GPA? Or someone handing out an outdated version of your resume at a career fair that doesn’t include that awesome internship you had last summer? Or even worse, a company getting a version of your resume that doesn’t include your leadership experiences within SWE? I would be willing to bet that you wouldn’t be too happy about this incorrect version of your resume because it misrepresents how amazing you actually are. The SWE brand is just like you and that resume. Because you’re reading this, I know you love SWE, and I highly doubt you would want to misrepresent this wonderful organization you love so much.
Now to the part where you can take action – how we use the brand correctly! I’m going to refer you back to the SWE brand guidelines, available here. These guidelines are actually pretty interesting: they discuss SWE’s unified brand, the history of the SWE logo, and the development of the new logo. My personal favorite is the info behind the logomark (gear in the logo): the gear honors the old logo with its shape and use of the original gold, the three segments represent Aspire/Advance/Achieve, and the three segments also represent the Society’s membership types (professional, collegiate, K-12).
Here are some main points from the guidelines to keep in mind when you are using the SWE logo:
- The logomark cannot be separated from the logotype. They are one entity.
- The logo cannot be combined with other logos, such as university or company logos.
- You can use the logo either by itself, with the full name, or with the full name and tagline.
- Headquarters has created a personalized logo for every group within the Society, which is the only allowable region/section/affiliate logo per SWE bylaws. Your group name replaces the tagline in these. If you do not have one of these already, contact headquarters.
- If you are using a multicolor version of the SWE logo, it must be the official full-color version. Solid color choices for the logo to be one color can be found in the brand guidelines.
The Chicago Regional Section has correctly adopted the new SWE logo while keeping an image typically associated with their section. Here’s what they’ve displayed on their website, which follows SWE guidelines:
- The branding guidelines explain how to correctly use the new logo.
- The logo itself and templates for letterhead and power point can be found here.
- We want to brand correctly to display a unified image for SWE. This society is amazing, and we wouldn’t want to portray it as anything less than that!
