UA corporate design (huisstijl)

The corporate design of the University of Antwerp was established 2006, mainly directed by the Antwerp-based KAN design group. It provides a logo, official colors, a font, and basically covers all the basic needs.

Unfortunately, it leaves some holes with respect to scientific applications. Some of the most striking shortcomings include:

• Unavailability of the corporate design font.

  

  This essentially means that, if you, as a member of the UA, want to use the corporate design, you first have to purchase the matching font "Auto 1" by Underware; it comes for about 200 Euro in a single-user license.

  Obviously that's quite a lot of money and I doubt that anyone at the university ever bought the font. The result of this is, of course, a zoo of documents and fonts used at the UA. One person finds MS Verdana quite nice looking, another one -- sheesh -- MS Comic Sans.

  The original idea of the corporate font is totally done way with.

• All templates only for Microsoft products.

  

  There are a number of office templates provided in the corporate design, such as letter and presentation templates. This effectively excludes users of all non-Microsoft products from accessing the corporate design.

  This is in line with the general Microsoft-affiliation of the Universiteit Antwerpen.

• Missing LaTeX templates

  

  Professional typesetting nowadays means LaTeX. It is particularly popular in Natural Sciences, where it almost maintains a monopoly on written papers and presentations.

  Within the LaTeX universe, the beamer package has emerge as the main presentation class, and most universities provide corporate design templates.

  The University of Antwerp doesn't.

Obviously, this website can't do a lot about the first two points, but it at least tries to provide some remedy. For example, a LaTeX beamer template has been created, a skin for the content management system Drupal (development started out years ago here at the UA), and it is hoped the the list can be extended further.

If you have hints, needs, encouragement, don't hesitate to leave a comment!

Cheers,
Nico