The Tilted Square

The tilted square. If you know what that is, you’re a Carnegie Mellon student/grad/staff/professor from some years back. CMU’s logo used to be that beloved square, tilted at 14 degrees.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find anymore. The university has pretty much purged it out of existence, and it’s not considered “correct” to use it anymore in university communications, documents, etc. Not even a throw back t-shirt to give us alumnae/alumni some love.

Below is the great tilted square logo. I’m posting this under the fair use clause of US copyright law, mainly for historical and criticism purposes. Note that CMU probably still owns the copyright to this image, so don’t go off using it for anything other than fair use (i.e., commercial purposes, etc.)

Many people consider it a very poor design for any number of reasons: the tilt itself, location of text relative to the basic shape, the fact that the text “cuts” across the square in a very unnatural way. Me? I like it, but maybe that’s because I think it represents what’s great about Carnegie Mellon: we’re a little bit different.

cmu tilted logo