NOSM University Brand Guide

Page one of the brand guide called NOSM Canada's first medical university. The real title is stronger: Canada's first independent medical university. Fact-checking page one set the tone for the other 27. Over three drafts I took the guide from v1.0 to v1.5: rewrote the logo sections, built a colour system with names from Northern Ontario, wrote the accessibility standards, and set policy for a logo that exists in three languages.

01 — THE GUIDERebuilt page by page

Most of what you're looking at didn't exist in v1.0. The colour architecture, the accessibility standards, the language policy: written, designed, and argued into the document one review meeting at a time. The 300+ tracked recommendations stayed in the working files where they belong. The spreads are what shipped.

02 — THE COLOURSNamed after home

Every colour got a name from Northern Ontario: Northern Navy, Superior Grey, Sunset Gold, Aurora Pink. Under the names sits an audience system. Presidential and donor work stays in core colours. Internal teams get secondary accents. External campaigns keep them under ten percent.

03 — THE POLICYOne logo, three languages

NOSM's logo exists in English, French, and Oji-Cree, and nobody had written down when to use which. Accessibility law says one thing, representation says another, budgets say a third. I wrote the policy that settles it: a three-step framework anyone at the university can defend, in written and flowchart form.

04 — IN PRODUCTIONMerch that follows the rules

The university store needed logo files it could print, so I built them. Apparel mockups on real product photography, every garment in all three languages, handed off as vendor-ready files.