UAB next month will begin introducing new branding for the school, hospital and athletic teams.

The distinctive green UAB with the slanted A has been around since the mid-1970s, while medicine and athletics have had multiple logos over the last 30 years.

An announcement from UAB this week unveiled the logos, colors and branding elements of the institution’s visual identity system.

“For the first time in our history, our primary logo will be shared across the university, medicine and athletics creating a unified brand,” the memo stated.

Core logos will be available internally at the end of August.

While UAB will roll out the full look in January, a refreshed logo will be visible at Protective Stadium during football season. Athletic apparel should be available in time for basketball season.

It’s the culmination of a process that began in 2019, said Rosie O’Beirne, chief digital and strategy officer in UAB’s Office of Marketing and Communications. Market research showed locally and in Alabama, the current monogram was recognizable.

“What we learned is that people on the outside of the state didn’t recognize it,” she said. “Sometimes it was interpreted as U4B, or ULB. So that started a conversation.”

For UAB, a new logo and brand refresh is one way to communicate its position as a regionally and nationally recognized institution – not only in education and patient care, but in research and athletics.

Over the past two years, the school worked with New South Research and used feedback from more than 10,000 survey responses from students, faculty, staff, alumni and others.

Then UAB turned to Ologie, a marketing and branding agency, which offered three options that were market tested earlier this year.

The final result – termed the “classic” option – gives the UAB letters more definition and will be the unified primary logo used across all of the institution’s entities: university, medicine and athletics.

The athletics logo adds a gold border effect to the letters to give it a “little more pop,” O’Beirne said.

“While people might look at those letters and think, you just straightened the A, you separated it, you made it more legible,” she said.

“What people don’t know behind the scenes is that it provided an opportunity for three parts of the university to have a conversation about how we can be unified. And that is really very powerful. It allows us to lean into the future and say, let’s be consistent so that all of our touchpoints are the same and allow people outside the state and globally to know UAB and what it stands for.”