I would like for the leaves to more closely resemble ginko leaves, but so far It's been hard to pull that off without the tree looking like a dandelion puff.
Woodlawn

Woodlyn.

 

Let's consider Woodlawn - A Name that leads with one of the W's best assets. The learning environment is a beautiful campus That has always featured prominently in anything associated with The W. I think that is a contributing factor as to why many students feel like "The W" is their personal Ivy.

Let's go ahead and do our due dilligence. Let's google that name. Woodlawn. It's a neighborhood in Birmingham & it's already a couple of schools. Ok, so we're back in the realm of education. But, as many things in the South, it's has associations with racial strife at Birmingham schools in the 1960s. Nope, We're not doing that. So, do we throw it away? Or pivot? How about Wood-lyn?

It's an interesting one. In our pile of words would it stand out or sleep? It's quiet, maybe a sleeper. It's not loud or obnoxious, but quiet and respectable. Let's look at it from a linquistics perspective. How does it sound, isolated from any context? Woodlyn. Wood-lyn. The first syllable begins as a soft entry to a deep resonance, terminating with a grounding tone evocative of its meaning, The solidity and stability of a tree. The second syllable, Light and lyrical, airy. Together it suggests a dense, rich environment where time moves more slowly, allowing one to contemplate higher things. It's likely to be pronounced differently depending on where you developed your accent. Pronounced with a Southern accent, it would likely be pronounced indistinguisibly from "woodland." Pronounced with a midwestern or northern accent, the beauty of the phoneme "lynne" becomes more prominent. In comparison to our original choices, It has a more poetic affect and a poetic meaning as well.

Woodlyn

Look at the glyphs, that compose the word. It's an attractive bunch. Stately and sumptuous.

The word Lyn means "light." So loosely, wood-lyn is "an illuminated forest?" Or as I prefer to phrase it, "A light in the wilderness." Because I think it cuts to the heart of the role a Liberal Arts University should play in our confounding, confusing times.

"A light in the wilderness" is a complement and modern update to The W's guiding principle of "We study light to bless with light" and updates that motto appropriate to the current confounding times. It an updated mission statement and guiding principle to be a place that doesn't just peddle credentials or vocational training, but instead girds the student with the tools to navigate & respond to a world that is in constant dramatic flux.

The name Lynne is traditionally feminine. Lynn is traditionally masculine. Lyn is neutral. Appropriate for the stated purpose of the rebrand.

This is not intended to be a brand replacement, but a brand refresh and reinvigoration that satisfies the need of making the school less objectionable to a key target demographic. While formal brand guidlines are well beyond the scope of this article, here are some suggestions: The branding is intended to be flexible and remain compatible with existing "The W" branding thereby preserving money for other uses. Going foward, all the existing brand colors could be used, but with addition of an invigorating bright yellow accent color in reference to a particular grand Ginko tree on campus that puts on a dramatic fall spectacle. I recommend a color in the neighborhood of "#ffcb31." If nothing else, think about how flexible and dynamic the athletic uniforms would look in variations of that color scheme! It's similar to the Golden State Warriors, but better.

 

Woodlyn University

Where does it live on the wheel? Sage, explorer, caregiver, hero. It makes promises of knowledge and empowerment.

One last issue on this name. Seeing as how the urban dictionary was a thorn in the side of initially proposed name. Let's check this one. I'm not conceeding any manner of absurd authority to UD, but lets not start out occupying the place "butt of pre-existing jokes" again. There is a 10 year old entry that says: "Woodlyne is a smart, beautiful young lady who always seem to appeal others with her constant smiling and giddy attitude. There should never be no bad vibes." I wouldn't adopt that as an unoffical motto or anything, but it's hard to deny that's an improvement over "sex addict."

 
 
“Even in America, where poetry isn’t important to most people, everyone recognizes that at crucial times prose just doesn’t cut it. When we fall in love, when we get married, or have a baby, when somebody dies, prose doesn’t do it. We need poetry at these times. One of my ideas is that if people could work poetry into their daily lives, their daily lives would be better—more pleasurable, more thoughtful. As a country we’d have more imagination, and with more imagination there would be more empathy toward each other and toward the other countries in the world.”