So, upon pondering a painting project in my basement, I went to look up the color mixtures of the official App State colors, and it caught my eye that we have maroon, dark blue, and dark green official colors. Why is this?



https://uc.appstate.edu/brand-identity- ... ide/colors

I honestly didn't know we had those as "official" colors but my assumption is that it is for the academic side of the university. I know that when I had my freshman orientation back in 1980, I was given a maroon t-shirt with the academic (dove dotting the "i") logo.

Any and every "style guide" created by a company, institution, etc. includes a palette of colors that can be utilized in visual communications. While App's primary colors are black, gold (yellow) and "old" gold, a complimentary palette composed of earth tones is also included. This part of the palette provides tones that remind one of the mountains.

So why do we need all these other colors? It's easy to see that using black and gold will only get you so far. The complimentary palette provides a graphic designer with a wider variety of "officially sanctioned" tones to use when creating visuals.

https://uc.appstate.edu/brand-and-ident ... media-mark

Used for other ways to distinguish different areas

Yeah as others have noted most universities have palettes to use in addition to their base colors. We would be super limited if we could only use black and gold across all communications. When I worked at UNCW we had an extra 5 or 6 colors we'd use for a variety of reasons.

Imagine the football team running out in maroon, blue, and forest green. It would be hideous and insane and I’d love every minute of it.