WICHITA — They’re calling it Wichita’s own version of the Gap debacle.
Along with unveiling almost $1 million in renovations at Century II late last week, the city debuted the center’s new logo.
The Wichita design community is not impressed.
“It made the rounds pretty immediately,” says Jarrett Green of Blink Interactive. “There was just a collective sort of, what is this?”
Among the comments is that it looks like: something a child drew, a part of the female anatomy, the top of a wok, the top of a grill and a briefcase in motion.
“I like it,” says John D’Angelo, the city’s arts and cultural services manager. “I think it’s nice. You know, it helps update the image.”
He says the logo will brand Century II as a performing arts center.
D’Angelo says he doesn’t mind the critical comments.
“We’ll take both criticism and compliments and review them. Absolutely. We’re always interested.”
The city paid $1,150 to Catherine Lewis of Exchange Design, who does a lot of work for the city’s division of arts and cultural services, to create the logo under its direction.
Not everyone with the city agreed with the direction, though.
“From a pragmatic point of view, I struggle a little bit — being in the business — with a logo design of that nature,” says City Council member Jeff Longwell, who has been in the graphics business for 30 years.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder here,” Longwell says. “Some people may just absolutely fall in love with the design. There’s elements of the design I kind of like.”
There are other parts he finds less appealing, and Longwell is concerned about reproduction issues.
He says the brush stroke that has a paint brush effect is hard to reproduce on, say, a shirt. He says there would be other screen printing reproduction issues as well.
Longwell plans to share his concerns with others at City Hall this week.
Several design experts have very specific concerns about the logo.
“For a premier center . . . the logo doesn’t work well in terms of clarity nor will it reproduce very well in other applications,” says Ann Willoughby of Willoughby Design in Kansas City.
“There are a lot of practical reasons it doesn’t work. For example, I don’t think it would work well as a sign, number one. I don’t think it’s going to reverse out.”
She means it won’t look good for times when it needs to be presented with a dark background.
Also, she says, the graphic isn’t in the right proportion to the letters.
“It will not function well as a logo for all the applications that you’ll need it for.”
There are broader issues as well, designers say.
“Century II is an iconic structure, and it really deserves something bold and elegant, and we just did not achieve that,” says Sonia Greteman of Greteman Group.
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