PITY the poor professional logo designer. He is as misunderstood as those guys who come up with state slogans like: Montana: Food, Folks and a Moose. Artist follows logo
design to the letterNo matter what he comes up with, everyone else thinks they could do better.
"You get paid for this?" is the verbal stiletto that is thrust into his gut when he unveils a new logo.
Along with, "I could have come up with that in 5 minutes," "That's so stupid," and "How do you get a job like this?"
I don't know Glenn Yoshiyama. He's probably a nice guy. But like a football field-goal kicker who just hooked a 23-yarder, he's probably laying low. He's the calligrapher who designed the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau's new logo. What he came up with is the word "Hawaii." Underneath it says, "Visitors & Convention Bureau."
That's it? He got paid for that? Yes. And he's not going to be hearing the end of it for awhile. But I think he did just fine, considering the brutal nature of logo design.
The employers ask an impossible task. They want a simple design to convey a multitude of ideas. There is a certain BS level built into this process. Whatever design the artist comes up with, he's going to have to accompany it with 43 pages of artsy-fartsy, PR baloney so that the employers feel they're getting their money's worth.
WHY can't they be honest. Why can't they just say, look, that King Kamehameha logo is looking kind of dated. We need something different. Give us something that isn't going to foul up the ink-jet printer and isn't going to tick off everyone. Some people are going to hate it, just because it's NOT King Kamehameha. Others are going to like it simply because it's different. And in a few years, it will look old-fashioned and we'll change it again.
But they can't say that. They have to play the game. And so Yoshiyama comes up with "Hawaii." But not just "Hawaii." It's Hawaii in sort of whimsical letters, sort of slap-dashed on the paper in pastel colors. And although the words below it look sort of dark and serious, he has thrown in an ampersand to give "Visitors & Tourist Bureau" a rather zany feel.
According to the HV"&"CB, the entire logo conveys four ideas: primitive, adventure, romance and contemporary. I suppose a committee decided that making the first "I" in "Hawaii" purple conveys the romantic nature of the islands. The "A," splashed in red and tilted just so, must convey adventure. The whole thing just reeks of "primitive" because it looks like it was stamped with an ink-dipped carved potato instead of simply using 72-point Bodoni Bold straight from the Macintosh font library.
SEE? It's easy to make fun of the new logo. But I won't. I think the logo looks just fine. And I don't care how much money he got paid for it. When you've got 1.2 million people looking over your shoulder, along with a bunch of other jealous artists and every bigwig in the tourist industry ... well, it's a wonder he came up with anything.
You certainly can't accuse Yoshiyama of being vague. Give us a Hawaii logo, they said. He gave them a logo that said "Hawaii." There.
Some are going to grouse. Couldn't we have palm trees? Or Diamond Head? Or a tourist getting stabbed at a North Shore bus stop? Ah! You see the problem. Logo designers can't be too specific. Groups get left out, politically incorrect ideas slip in and entire races, genders and cultures get their feelings hurt.
Then you've got a PR nightmare on your hands. Mayor Jeremy Harris ends up on CNN explaining that "Hawaii: We're in Heat" simply means that we have sunny beaches.
No, merely saying "Hawaii" is brilliant. Let people draw their own conclusions.
