Los Angeles’ new tourist logo is so 80s Ocean Pacific

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Los Angeles has a new logo. Like me, you may have two reactions to this news. The first one: I didn’t know LA had a logo. Closely followed by, Who needs a logo when you have Dodgers gear?

But LA does have a logo – a logo designed by the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau in order to raise the profile of our city with, well, tourists and conventioneers. Last month, the logo received a refresh after nearly a decade.

Gone are the reluctant white script that said “Los Angeles” and was underlined in blue – a font that tried hard not to be the logo for Los Angeles Review, and a bruise who was trying hard not to be Dodger-y.

Try hard: The old Los Angeles tourist logo was developed a decade ago.

(Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau)

It’s now been replaced by much more punchy writing, delivered in a tropical palette of color gradients – turquoise, pink, and gold – all set under the image of a setting sun. The old logo probably held its place on a piece of letterhead; the new one is ready to put on sorbet-y beach t-shirts. (More on that later.)

The Los Angeles logo is a collaboration between Shepard Fairey’s number one studio and Home industries, a design boutique run by Andy Cruz with a specialty in logos and fonts. The launch is scheduled for the reopening of Los Angeles following the pandemic. (It is part of a new promotional campaign which presents LA as “your comeback story.”)

The multi-colored design has been trumpeted as reflecting the diversity of Los Angeles. Fairey, in a statement accompanying the post, said part of the challenge was to design “a brand that represents all the things Los Angeles means to people.”

A logo that reads "Angels" in turquoise, pink and orange also features a setting sun.

The new Los Angeles logo is the result of a collaboration between Studio Number One of Shepard Fairey and House Industries, directed by Andy Cruz.

(Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau)

He was also to have a wide appeal with his potential clients, whether they were global companies looking to book conventions in Los Angeles or tourists who thought they could actually see a celebrity in Hollywood. And, as has been prominently pointed out in a story about the redesign in Fast Company, “Part of the mission was to attract Gen Z and Millennial visitors to key markets.”

Generation X is mentioned absolutely nowhere. I understand we’re middle aged cranks and nobody wants us, but if there’s one design era that the new logo is channeling, it’s the ’80s. And guess who was alive and rocking the Aqua Net at the time?

When the new logo started circulating on social media earlier this week, some early reviews compared it to the graphic design of the 1980s crime show “Miami Vice”.

I do not agree. Logos can share the color turquoise, but the “Miami Vice” logo is angular, inspired by Art Deco. (If the logo looks like Miami, it’s the flamboyant design of the 2018 uniforms for the Miami Heat, which featured a script logo inspired by a font used at Miami Arena in the 1980s.)

More than anything, LA’s new logo is firmly rooted in California surf culture.

Cruz told Fast Company the team drew inspiration from hand-painted panels and skate gear, such as the bridges produced by “Dogtown & Z-Boys” icon Tony Alva, who often features a logo with a bold script. When I saw the design, I was immediately brought back to the Ocean Pacific brand T-shirts from my youth, which were often adorned with gradient logos and images of palm trees and sunsets.

The new LA logo was displayed on a billboard outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood last month

The new LA logo is displayed on a billboard outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

(Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau)

Ocean Pacific – better known as OP – was also famous for its incredibly popular corduroy men’s shorts, which still regularly materialize as vintage items on EBay (some around $ 100). Founded in 1972 by Jim Jenks while working at an Encinitas surf store, the brand, along with Hang Ten, became one of the first to market surf fashion to an audience beyond surfers. .

OP sold a vision of the California lifestyle that tasted like salt water and was personified by pretty, sun-kissed blondes. At its peak, its licensing operations exceeded $ 400 million. But after financial problems and internal struggles in the 1990s, the name was finally sold to the licensing company Iconix Brand Group in 2006. Today, it is still possible to buy tanks with the degraded OP logo from the 80s as part of the brand’s “heritage” collection. (Don’t worry, Gen-X, we’re not old, we’re “the legacy.”) The business regularly post images back of his vintage creations on Instagram – flashbacks that would look good at home with the new Los Angeles logo.

Of course, the roots of surf design run deeper than the OP. The tropical color palette was something that had been popularized a generation before – by graphic designers such as John Van Hamersveld, who designed the poster for “The Endless Summer”, helping to transform the vibrant shades of orange, from pink and yellow in basic graphic design elements. (A fascinating piece Vanity Fair on the history of poster design, quotes Lorraine Wild, former director of the graphic design program at CalArts, who noted that prior to this poster orange was not a color “used by serious designers. from the east coast. “)

Like its design ancestors, the LA Tourism and Convention Board logo aims to channel the vibe of Heaven on Earth – LA as a land of tasty waves and ethereal sunsets. It’s a nostalgic logo for VW buses and surf magazines.

This is an LA that is often more illusion than truth, an LA that couldn’t feel further removed from the one that emerged, dragged and divided, in the wake of the pandemic, where political battles rage around cleaning up homeless camps by the sea. in Venice.

But travel marketing is not the bearer of hard news. It’s a grain of truth served in a generous fancy breadcrumbs. This is probably why no one asked me to design the logo. Because the real LA logo isn’t a sunset. This is one of those gas stations on fire painted by Ed Ruscha.

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