Logo Design and The City

What makes a city a better place to live? What makes a city attractive? Among the most important characteristics are its history, its touristic potential, its business appeal, its public services and thus its quality of life. 

When a city possesses one or more of these qualities and makes a "show and tell" about it, it becomes a brand. But a brand without a logo design is doomed to oblivion.

Cities have always been brands but were more or less aware about it. In the last decades though, the idea of city branding is now embraced by more and more cities who crystallize and emboss their major qualities, advantages and attractions.

But holding out a bunch of qualities is not enough for a city to became a brand. It has to gather all its strength in one tag line, in one logo design and promote it ferociously at national and international level with all advertisable means.

Unfortunately there are cases of cities who doesn't attract investments or talents (ultimately, this is the final purpose of a city branding) because their brand is not strong, the logo design doesn't emboss properly the city's spirit or is just poorly promoted. In other cases a city has to little to offer or has a negative fame.

However, let's take a look at a couple of city brands, successfully or not.

The Big Apple

Originally New York was economically centered, but evolved into a multitude of attractions like The Empire State Building, Central Park, Greenwich Village, the MET, The Museum of Modern Art, The Statue of Liberty, Times Square, The New York Public Library, The Guggenheim etc.

The first use of the term Big Apple was made in 1920 by John J. Fitzgerald, a Morning Telegraph reporter as a reference to the city’s racetracks. Its modern use is related to a publicity campaign developed in 1971 by the New York Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. Ever since, New York has always been referred to as “The Big Apple”.

The 1970 advertising campaign used to promote tourism in order to surpass the recession period, promoted the “I Love NY” logo design and slogan with a huge success. The campaign is one of the most successful in the history of emotional branding and city logo design.

Even today, I LOVE NEW YORK is the official slogan for the State of New York being still used to promote New York with no logo design alterations.

But NY had many struggles that eventually and fortunately added up to its fame and glory.

In 1970 it had to fight recession; in the eighties it had a skyrocketing crime rate (the famous case of the NY subway), yet successfully overtaken.

Then there was 9/11.

However Mayor Bloomberg, consider New York City a “luxury brand” with a huge potential. Further more, it's a rare case of logo design that has survived successfully over three decades with no changes.

Even though NY is probably best-known city planet, is still has to work hardly to compete with other cities like Las Vegas, Tampa, Atlanta and Kansas City, whom in 2003 had more aggressive advertising campaigns.

Berlin

Berlin is one of the Europe's youngest city, with a coat of arms as a logo design that symbolizes the city strength and history. The city's origins go back in the 12Th century, being developed out of two settlements, Berlin and Cölln.

The bubonic plague from 1576 killed more then 4,000 people in the city.

The great town center fire of 1830 damaged most written records of those early days.

Of a recent history Adolf Hitler had great plans to transform Berlin, because he said Berlin was one of the ugliest cities in the world. Therefore, with his architect he made enormous plans for the new Berlin, the Welthauptstadt Germania.

But as Hitler thought it would be insane to start such a project during the war, the project never started.

At the end of the WWII, 70% of Berlin had been destroyed by Allied air raids and street fighting. By the London Protocol of 1944, Berlin was divided into four sectors each controlled by rotation by one of the Allies.

The Berlin Wall was erected on 13 August 1961, physically separating West Germany from the East Germany, as a response to massive fleeing of the East Germans into West Berlin to escape the communism. Once the Wall done, the border separating the two factions of the city ran more than 166 km.

The Wall came down in 1989 and the entire world watched as hundreds hammered parts of the Wall down. Today, only small parts of the wall is still standing, as a symbol of the democracy triumph over repression.

The Nazi crimes during World War II and the Berlin Wall are probably the most significant branding problems that Berlin must overcome.

However, Berlin is one of the few cities in the world that risked marketing itself as a progressive city with nothing to hide, attempting to do a unique thing - branding itself with both its positive and negative qualities. Berlin is embracing its history, both good and bad, using it's coat of arm logo design as a distinctive and continuous symbol of greatness, history and power in spite all scars history left on it.

The challenge now for Berlin is to develop a strong brand for itself. As an economic outpost and cultural mosaic Berlin has become a global city, incorporating technologies, labor forces, economical power and history.