Vancouver unveils new city logo proposals

City is confident sleek new designs will avoid controversy

By Greg Waldock, Staff Writer

The City of Vancouver has revealed the new options for the official city logo following the disastrous release of the previous logo in early 2017.

“Our previous attempt was a failure, and we acknowledge that,” said a spokesperson for the city council. “So we decided to go a completely different route with it. We tried to design the old logo by committee through an actual artist with experience, so this time we’ll be cutting out the middle man. Each logo proposal comes straight from the bureaucracy itself!”

The designs were drawn up individually by council members and other public servants, then given to a graphic designer hired by the city. “He’s just there to make them digital,” said Tim Stevenson, city councillor. “What do graphic designers know about art? Now politicians—THOSE are the true creative types.” At a press conference last week, Mayor Gregor Robertson proudly showed an image his daughter drew as a kid and said it was up for consideration, alongside submissions from other children of members of the municipal government. The Conservative Party attempted to propose their own city logos, but the movement was blocked by Kellie Leitch when she found out she’d have to use non-white crayons.

We found the graphic designer, Michael Durham, in the fetal position at City Hall, surrounded by stress balls and crushed energy drink cans.

“They come up here every three hours with a new design,” he had said through choked-back tears. “They don’t listen when I say a design is ugly, or offensive, or derivative. Or all three. They just roll their eyes and tell me to ‘computer it out.’ See this?” The designer had then pulled out an office memo from his desk drawer. “These are instructions from the mayor himself to have the logo feature running water. Real, actual, wet running water. In a picture. I talked to my manager but she said I’d be fired if I complained. I went to the Art Institute, man.”

As we interviewed Mr. Durham, a councilwoman had walked in and told him to “switch the ‘C’ and the ‘N’ in the old controversial logo, and re-release it,” because the typo would be “quirky and fun, like the kids with their texting nowadays.”

The city council attempted to hold an online poll to decide the winning logo, which was immediately overrun by trolls and ended in a tie between a Nazi swastika made of rolled joints and a communist hammer-and-sickle made of rolled joints.