Rebranding Ottawa

No, we’re not talking about the election aftermath – though Spacing Ottawa would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the winners, offer our consolations to the losers, and give a big tip of the hat to all those who put their hat in the ring for what turned out to be Ottawa’s most contested election ever.

We are talking about new beginnings though – in graphic design. Take our city’s logo, for example.

Ottawa’s post-amalgamation logo looks to be exactly the sort of innocuous branding cities get when a series of committees has oversight of the creative process. In the four years we’ve had it, no one ever got violently ill looking at our logo, but no one was ever inspired by either. Most Canadian cities do better; Vancouver has the waves of blue, Saskatoon has rows of wheat, London has a lovely tree , Halifax has sailing ships, and so on. In fact, at least in our cursory look around Wikipedia, only Calgary’s flag seems as bland as ours and even it has a tiny cowboy hat in it, which is at least funny.

Luckily, to deal with the “pride gap” felt by citizens from places with boring or non-existent city logos, there’s a new online project to the rescue. We’ll quote the blogger at Regina Urban Ecology, who wrote about it last week:

CitID is a very cool project started by design firm Norwegian Ink of Oslo. Their concept is to have a logo for every single municipality on Earth as a means of helping each city gain a little bit of global recognition. They invite all creatives to visually represent a place that they love and showcase it to the world. It is a great global community project focused on increasing understanding and celebrating uniqueness of place. It’s fun to look at their online gallery and see the variety of styles and ideas represented (there can obviously be multiples for a particular city). And as they say on their site “come for visual inspiration and leave with more knowledge about the world we live in.” I know I had never heard of Tashkent, Uzbekistan before I visited their site… it worked!

As of last checking, there don’t seem to be any entries for Canadian cities.

A couple of our favourite CitID logos include stylish Ghent, and a Beirut logo formed from what looks like shards of glass. There’s also a very satirical Cologne, featuring an obese “city father” snoozing off an afternoon beer drunk, a subway train crushed under his armpit, which has us wondering if perhaps Cologne has had a municipal election of its own lately.