Yale Blue


Yale Blue is the dark azure color used in association with Yale University.

History

Since the 1850s, Yale Crew has rowed in blue uniforms, and in 1894, blue was officially adopted as Yale's color, after half a century of the university being associated with green. In 2005, University Printer John Gambell was asked to standardize the color. He had characterized its spirit as "a strong, relatively dark blue, neither purple nor green, though it can be somewhat gray. It should be a color you would call blue." A vault in the university secretary's office holds two scraps of silk, apocryphally from a bolt of cloth for academic robes, preserved as the first official Yale Blue.
The university administration defines Yale Blue as a custom color whose closest approximation in the Pantone system is Pantone 289. Yale Blue inks may be ordered from the Superior Printing Ink Co., formulas 6254 and 6255.

Other uses

The hue of Yale Blue is one of the two official colors of Indiana State University, the University of Mississippi, and Southern Methodist University. The official color "DCU Blue" of Dublin City University is very close to Yale Blue.
Yale Blue was an official color of the University of California, Berkeley, through at least 2007; the university has since adopted Pantone 282 as its blue.
It was Duke University's official color from the 1880s until 1961, when the school adopted Prussian blue. However, Pantone 289 remains an acceptable approximation.