Last week, the city of Raleigh unveiled its new logo, for which it paid the princely sum of $226,000$83,000 to Oklahoma-based consultants to do research, and $143,000 to the local design firm The Assembly to actually make the thing. Perhaps inevitably, there were, shall we say, mixed reviews on the internet. But since we’re not art critics, we’ll leave be the question of whether it’s good or not. (For the record, INDY design director Shan Stumpf says: “It’s not bad. Minimalist. The oak tree transforms from being composed of more organic shapes to modern, hard-edged shapes. It is a bit corporate-looking.”) Instead, we wanted to know the first thing that came to people’s minds when they saw it.
So we put the question out there on Facebook and Twitter and sent our photographer to downtown Raleigh to gauge the vox populi. Here’s what we heard.
“The city should have appealed to all these innovative companies that call Raleigh home to see what they could come up with”
“A company should have volunteered to do that, and the city should have donated some of that money to charity.”
“It’s too modern. Raleigh is the City of Oaks, and I don’t see any oaks.”
“It looks like the logo after BP oil spill. You know, the go-green one. I like it.”
“It’s not bad, but the amount of money they spent on it, is a little crazy.”
“Having the old historic logo seems to fit Raleigh better. It just doesn’t look like a city logo. It looks like a business logo.”
“It’s very boring. It needs to be more vibrant.”
“It’s interesting. I kind of get the binary look, but at the same time, it looks like agriculture. I think it’s pretty cool.”
