For roughly the last 15 years, Northwestern has used a set of typefaces with increasing consistency to represent both its athletics program and the school in general. Some of these are relatively recent additions to the school's aesthetic; others have roots going back over a century.

The recent set of academic fonts include Campton, Periódico (NU uses a variant of this for its main wordmark), Poppins, Noto Serif, and Akkurat.

NU's athletic typeface is Morgan Poster Avec, which took hold in the early 2010s and became more visible with the choice to add it to the new Under Armour jerseys in 2012:

Two years later, when Northwestern introduced its Gothic uniforms, it put "Northwestern" on the chest in a Gothic font:

This font is famously used on NU's old black and gold signs outside most of its buildings, a style the school has used for decades. The typeface, Gothic NU, is very distinct. Two notable features of this typeface are the lower-case "spoke t" (which forks at the top) and the capital N, which is simpler and more Latin than most Gothic typefaces.


However, this is not the only Gothic font found on campus. Deering Library, built in 1933, is a neo-Gothic building that architect James Gamble Rogers designed after the Chapel of King's College at Cambridge. Finished in 1515, the chapel displayed buttresses, vaults, and arches typical of the style that could itself be traced back to French medieval architecture. Gamble initially took inspiration from the English chapel when he designed Yale's library, before applying the style to NU.

The inscriptions at Deering are also rendered in a distinct Gothic font:


These two examples, with typefaces nearly identical, save for the bottom example being elongated, show the Gothic script used for the library. Like Gothic NU, the Deering font is also custom and unique to the university. It is similar to medieval and Tudor gothic type styles, which feature some capital letters rendered in minuscule style (note the "H" in "Happy," above). This differs from Gothic NU, which has more capital letters rendered in majuscule (note the N on the Northwestern jersey, vs. the N on the Weber Arch, below).

When Northwestern constructed its entry arch in 1993, which it dedicated in 1994 as the Weber Arch, it used yet another font style, but one much closer to the Deering font:



The lower-case t in the Deering/Arch font has a sloped top, a more common style than Gothic NU, and the capital letters are typically minuscule, like the N in on the arch.

With its 2026 purple Gothic uniforms, NU has combined both of its custom fonts: it is keeping some of the uniform in Gothic NU (the "Northwestern" wordmark on the back of the helmet, for example), while adding some components in the Deering/Arch font (the "Northwestern" and "University" inscriptions on the shoulder stripes).