The City of Washington unveiled its new logo last week, a logo that will be part of a new branding effort for not only the city but some of its partners.
Those partners in that branding effort are the Washington Tourism Development Authority, Washington-Beaufort County Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Harbor District Alliance. Those agencies and city departments are expected to incorporate the “W” logo into logos that identify themselves, with different color schemes used in those separate logos.
In July 2011, the council endorsed the branding project, which will promote Washington and surrounding environs. Before then, the project partners had been working for approximately a year to develop a comprehensive brand. Each partner invested $2,000 in the project.
The development of a community brand will allow the city and other partner organizations to have one common theme in its efforts to promote the city to businesses, residents and visitors, according to the partners. They contracted with Eye Integrated to develop the branding program for the city.
“One of the deliverables, if you will, from this process has been a logo, a log that is both unifying — unifying all four organizations so that you can tell they’re all from one community — but also unique in that it gives each entity its own identity,” City Manager Josh Kay told the council during its Aug. 13 meeting.
The city will be “the keeper of the art” related to the logo and it will be responsible for managing how the logo is used and who uses it, Kay added.
“Again, this logo was built through almost an entire year of consensus building through those four partnerships, through those four organizations,” Kay said.
The logo features a “W” that is made with waves, said Kay, but one City Council member expressed concern those waves made the “W” look like a series of S’s. Councilman Doug Mercer said that when he viewed a T-shirt with the new logo on it before the council meeting, he saw three S’s.
“The contrast between the three S’s or the swirls has got to be strong enough that you can make that connection to make the ‘W.’ If it’s not strong enough, I think people are going to see three S’s,” Mercer said.
Mayor Archie Jennings weighed in on the flexibility of the logo, including different color choices for different departments and organizations.
“So, what I like about that is different organizations or departments could have some identity and be recognizable by color or different tag lines, but they’d all tie back in to the same theme,” Jennings said.