ETSU President Brian Noland presented April 30 the university’s new logo at the spring fling.

Throughout the 2013-14 academic year, the university has hosted focus groups for prospective logos and worked to take the comments of individuals who participated in the focus groups into account.

The university’s new logo takes the form of a shield adorned with an “E” that incorporates the shape of the state of Tennessee.

This logo replaces the standing logo, which emphasized the initials of the university and the mountains of the East Tennessee region.

Noland said in a statement that has been posted to the university’s new identity page on its website that the university believed that it was being represented by too many different logos.

“These images are used in a variety of forms such as business cards, letterhead, printed and graphic media, our website, and countless other representations of the institution,” Noland wrote in the statement. “In addition to these three primary images, we also use more than 120 separate/secondary university logos to represent various colleges, departments, units, and clubs. This landscape is further confounded by a lack of clarity in the official colors for ETSU, which range from blue and gold to yellow and light blue, as well as shades of grey.

“As noted in the work of the Committee for 125, this lack of consistency has led to questions about the visual identity of ETSU.”

Noland said that the change in logo is meant to develop consistency in terms of the university’s identity.

“This will not be an overnight change,” Noland said. “This will be a gradual transition, one that we anticipate may take about two years to complete.”