Guest post: Leibowitz on downtown logo

By on October 21st, 2008 In Hype!

Below is a guest post from David Leibowitz, Vice President, Creative at Moses Anshell. We asked him to weigh in on the new downtown Phoenix logo.

If there’s a more difficult, less rewarding job in the world of marketing than logo development, I’ve yet to discover it. Logos are like Rorschach blots — people bring to them their own preconceived notions, tastes and values. Usually that means that the designer is damned no matter what he or she does. Pick green, someone comes along and says, “You should have used blue.” Sketch a circle and along comes the next expert who believes an isosceles triangle would have been more fitting. It’s all about personal taste: For every Nike swoosh that helps define a brand, there’s a disaster like this:

When clients come to us with logo jobs, I have two rules that seem to work pretty well:

1. Run.
2. When you can’t do the above, make sure the logo tells the best, most complex story possible. With that as a guide, I have to argue that the new downtown Phoenix logo and its accompanying “X marks the spot” tag falls maybe a little bit short.

Why?

Because great stories are based on detail and specificity — on capturing the essence of what it is they represent. Great stories convey the energy of a place, its taste and feel and sound. They immediately cancel out a range of possibilities in your head — it isn’t this, it isn’t that, it isn’t that either. Instead, they make an affirmative statement … YOU ARE HERE.

My point: What does “X marks the spot” actually say about downtown Phoenix? Not much. You could put the X anywhere, as Dale Jensen notes in the Business Journal story (“it has a million uses.”) and that’s a problem — if a place has a million uses, then it really has no uses. X might mark the spot in Tempe, or Flagstaff, or Timbuktu or ancient Rome. The same goes for the shapes and colors that comprise the logo itself: The lime green and the orange seem to work at cross-purposes, as does the x and the circle. The end result is a confusing set of energies and emotions, one that doesn’t cohere into a story that seems to represent the downtown Phoenix I’ve worked in every day for the past three years.

Basically, that’s a long way of saying, “Yeah, I would have done it differently.” But no one asked me. And if they had, I might have run for the hills — or Barsmith for a beer.

Comments

Ronald Loar Says:
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:40 pm

bizAZ says they asked Moses Anshell’s vp of creativity to weigh in on “the new downtown Phoenix logo.” I anticipated seeing a new logo for Downtown Phoenix. Instead, the photo is of what appears to be the office front for Arlington Pediatric Center. While the logo is a classic example of “you get what you pay for” (APC must have hired one of those ‘logos for $69′artists that are all over the Web; the sad fact is that bizAZ implies that this is a downtown Phoenix logo, instead of a logo seen in downtown Phoenix. I suspect that since bizAZ is folding at the end of November, they had already given their editor the pink slip.

Jim Veihdeffer Says:
October 24th, 2008 at 12:32 pm

The APC logo is one of a collection of designs being forwarded around the Internet as examples of inadvertent subliminal messages that can be taken as raunchy — sort of a “See what happens when designers aren’t being watched” meme. Some of the cited examples (if you bother to look them up) are undoubtedly the product of Photoshoppers pranksters; however, as I recall, the APC is genuine. I have to agree though that I anticipated seeing the Phoenix Downtown logo in this posting. Note that it is cited in the link at the very top.

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