If you were keeping up with the City of Charleston’s newsletters throughout recent stormy weather, you might have noticed something different. The city’s branding changed. And reportedly, city council members found out about it when everybody else did.
Emblazoned at the top of online press communications beginning in early August was a new brand mark with a lot of the same iconography as the city’s historic seal. It includes the Charleston harbor skyline and a woman holding a laurel crown, which was added to the official seal in 1907. The new icon also retains the Latin phrases, “Aedes mores juraque curat,” which means “she guards her buildings, customs and rights” and “Civitatis regimine donata A. D. 1783,” which translates to “given to the rule of the citizens in 1783.”
But missing in the new brand — which one designer calls a minimalist, modernized design — are original details like the recognizable steeples of the St. Philip’s Church and St. Michael’s Church, both part of the original 1790 design.
“When I saw that the artist didn’t even reimagine the steeples correctly, that brought me to a huge conclusion,” one local designer, who wished to remain nameless, told the City Paper. “I was done looking at it at that point.”
City official says official seal isn’t changing
But the city’s new director of communications said the official seal isn’t changing.
“That’s not going anywhere,” said Deja Knight McMillan. “That’s been there since 1790, and the version we use today has been here since 1907.”
So what’s the deal with this new version that excludes historic embellishments and recognizable locales? It’s part of a long-term plan to update the city’s branding, McMillan said.
“This new logo is just being used as a kind of placeholder,” she said in an exclusive interview with the Charleston City Paper. “We derived it from the seal, because obviously, it’s beautiful, and we didn’t want to just rebrand the city entirely overnight. … It’s just being used for unofficial documents. Anything official — think proclamations, ordinances, resolutions, anything the mayor signs or that comes out of council — will still use the official seal.”
Meanwhile the artist who was critical of the city’s new effort said that the absence of the steeples told her that either the new brand’s designer didn’t know or care about the city’s history.
“I really pride myself on being a Charleston designer,” said the artist. “We have a lot of local artists and branding agencies, and they were overlooked for this. … I think maybe the city of Charleston just doesn’t realize how big and how talented the artist community is here.”
McMillan said the team behind the new logo is local, and its work is part of a larger “content creation” contract. It handles photography, videography and digital design. She also added the brand modernization is a part of the new Cogswell administration’s goals for the city as a whole.
“We feel like we are communicating to more people directly than ever before,” she said. “So we decided to pull all of the things that make up the seal and put it in a format that is a little bit more cleaned up. … It just points toward what we’re wanting to do overall with this administration, which is to modernize and streamline how we do things.”
A quiet rollout … or caught with pants down?
The brand’s critic said modernization — and even minimalist design — isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and even had some positive reaction to the logo’s design at first glance. But it didn’t hold up to closer inspection. And she said she would have liked to see the local community more involved in the decision-making and designing processes.
“I think they could have done it in a different way,” she said. “The main thing would be to find … people who know their stuff and know their history and are willing to put the research and passion behind the art. It will show everyone that you want to be involved with the local community and the designers and artists who are already here.”
Charleston City Council member Karl Brady agreed.
“I saw it when everybody else did. It just appeared,” he told the City Paper. “If we were going to go through a rebrand, it would have been nice for us to provide some input on it. … I wish we had been consulted and provided a little feedback.”
McMillan said that is the goal for future branding projects, but that getting something digital now rather than later was a bigger priority for the communications team.
“It’s really important to have something that really encompasses the entire city and everyone in it because we have such a diverse group of people here and so many diverse cultures. Our city is built on a diverse tapestry, and making sure all of those people and all the different parts of this city are represented is really important.”
McMillan, who grew up in Alabama, said the full rebranding process is probably “a ways away,” as city leaders would want to include the community in the design process in some way.
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