Designing a city logo can be a difficult but rewarding process: when doing this one should keep in mind that, unlike company logos, a city logo involves a huge cultural background and will be representing the image of the city on many levels – from the political to the social and economical one. Therefore, a careful consideration of what the image chosen for the logo will symbolize and entail is absolutely necessary.
First of all, this sort of logos originate from the old city heraldics, and they still have a strong resemblance to them: when designing a city logo one should be aware that, much like in the old heraldics, each visual element is expected to be a symbol for something related to the city, and that this logo will become the image of the city and it should be very effective in essentializing its main features or its general cultural representation.
It is absolutely necessary to study the city’s past and present landmarks, its history, its main economical activities, its cultural symbols and to look at the old heraldic emblems of the city as well. That is why, managing to create a modern, functional image of the city can be a very difficult and elaborate process.
In this article we will be looking at some highly professionally designed or re-designed city logos and we’ll be comparing them with the old symbols that they started from – just to make the process of modernizing them more visible and to show how a historical symbol can be re-evaluated and successfully used in modern logo design. Finally, if your city/town is not listed here or there is no current modern logo for it, how would you make it look like?
