On the front page of our local newspaper this morning was the following item:
A new city logo. So what? Well, bear with me.
See, the city of Mountain View decided to pay $66,000 to create a new logo. It already had a logo, as you can see above (featuring what appears to be a brown sun, but perhaps the newspaper didn’t do it justice), but now it has a new logo.
If an omniscient being were able to somehow calculate the net positive good by changing from the old logo to the new logo, I suspect the answer would be something along the lines of “zero“.
But I’m in a generous mood: let’s just say that just about the only problem Mountain View has is its dowdy old logo, and in order to get its citizens – – both real and potential – – pumped up about the wonderfulness of their town, what they really needed is a kick-ass new logo, then things will be right as rain.
Well, I have no particular objection to a municipality coming up with a new logo, even if they have the temerity to describe it as “a refreshed visual identity” which shows that the city “is cutting-edge yet compassionate” (I’m not quite sure where one is supposed to divine the compassion from within the graphic shown , but I’m supposing it’s either the pathway in the illustration or perhaps their choice of font.)
But here’s my real beef with it: they paid $66,000 for this thing. Sixty-six thousand dollars. Now I realize in the grand scheme of things, with the government wasting pretty much every penny of the trillions and trillions of dollars it goes through, that sixty-six thousand dollars is not even considered rounding error.
However, I think it’s a vitally-important object lesson in the mentality of the people who work in the government and seriously, seriously, seriously do NOT care about what stuff costs or how it turns out. Why should they? They’re just there to grind their way through the work day and get paid. I mean, for God’s sake, these are people that chose to work for the government. For real! Can you imagine any human being more poorly designed for efficient, effective decisions?
Let’s pretend for a moment that I have a tiny little company (which I do), that I need a new logo (which I don’t, but let’s just say) and that I need to find someone to help me, since I have no artistic skills of my own. How on earth would I go about this? How would I solve this problem?
Well, there are roughly ninety million people with design skills to whom I can turn, and I can reach any of them, no matter where they are in the world. So, having given this rubric roughly two seconds of deep though, I go to Fiverr (or any of the other gazillion sites that do the same thing), punch in “design logo“, and voi-freaking-la.
Gosh, what are the price ranges? Under $20. And then from $20 to $45. And then, if I’m feeling extra-special, maybe go top shelf and reach for the $45-$70 range.
I mean, for the love of GOD, people, do you honestly think that the logo created above is quite literally 1,000 to 2,000 times BETTER than what I could have someone from Fiverr create? (I use that coefficient since that is the price difference between, let’s say, $66 and $66,000; believe me, the math checks out). And I have, in fact, hired artists for creative work before. Hell, I had one talented fellow from Pakistan (of all places) create 64 different original prices of art for me for my ticker.art site, and not only did he go through many iterations on every single one until I was happy, but I can tell you that all sixty-four original pieces of art cost a tiny, tiny, TINY fraction of $66,000.
As we all let this sink in, take a look at some of the logos from other local towns (this was from the same article):
So even if whatever employee in Mountain View City Hall who was tasked with getting a new logo made had no idea where to start, they could simply offer up the above palette of ideas (in which trees, sunshine, and hills seem to be a recurring motif) and had their $50/project hire execute it without a care in the world.
Proving, once again, if you want anything done poorly, but at tremendous and idiotic expense, just entrust the task to any given government body to get the job done.
