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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

This field is so vague and lame now. Everyone basically copies the branding language from cable companies and telecom.

Government in particular should have a aura of authority and stability. Making stuff look like a letter from Comcast is pretty meh.

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I feel like the National Park Service in particular has nailed this. Their branding is unique, instantly recognizable, and long-lived. Here’s their brand guidelines page: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/hfc/nps-graphic-identity-and-st...

They even recently went through a minor redesign, where they kept the “feel” but updated a bit: https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/new-logo-reintroduces...

I’m also a fan of the Canadian federal government website (http://canada.ca) and the UK government (http://gov.uk)

I knew a dev that did Canadian government web dev contracts. They have a very particular style. They sound like a nightmare, frankly. Very well specified though, not much ambiguity there.

It’s probably because of bilingualism and fanatical focus on accessibility.

The USFS has had defined color schemes for everything since at least the 40s. I cant find a reference offhand but I recall it goes back Pinchot around the turn of the century. They are very intentional about a consistent image and ensuring human elements fit in the local biome.

https://www.fs.fed.us/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm07732807/paint.do...

Part of it is the democratization of creation. It's a logo _anyone_ could have created. It looks like an olympics logo at certain sizes, and an abstraction of a cut jewel at others. What it doesn't do is make you think anything about Oklahoma, or education...

> Part of it is the democratization of creation. It's a logo _anyone_ could have created.

I'm not sure that's democratization, lol.

That's just 'democratization' of the word 'democratization', man.

>It looks like an olympics logo at certain sizes, and an abstraction of a cut jewel at others.

I see at least three things: a flowery circle in five colors at very small sizes (Olympics logo?), a cut jewel (around a white star) at medium sizes, and the white star (surrounded by colored arrows) at very large sizes. It makes the logo quite confusing for me.

This is a really good meta point. There's a weird kind of cultural secularity with branding these days, largely because every company wants to appeal to everyone on earth, so they take these plain, fairly benign shapes and forms.

Though the logo is really quite nice, it's also fairly generic. It looks like a logo for a petrol company.

I think states can safely stick to old-timey fonts and images if they want.

It'd be nice to see some smart creative agencies take this issue on because I'll bet they've noticed the same.

You know which state had the best designs? Nazi Germany. And their uniforms were impeccable. Sad that they destroyed the peaceful notion of the original symbolism.

Then now we have Native American symbols stolen but the people murdered and forgotten. Strange world we live in.

Fascists have some great design chops. Check out the propaganda of Switzerland's SVP party. It is :100:.

I'd say communist propaganda posters are pretty good too.

> It looks like a logo for a petrol company.

To a very rough approximation, Oklahoma is a petrol company.

A petrol company with a horrible training/teaching process.

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