Advertising strategists will often recommend brand recognition as an effective way to keep companies, organizations or products on the minds of customers while also building loyalty and trust.
The city of Philomath feels it could use an attractive brand presence beyond its current use of the city seal. As a result, a logo design team will be meeting in the coming weeks to come up with an image that will come to represent Philomath.
Chelsea Starner, assistant city manager, went through the process with city councilors during an Aug. 12 meeting.
The logo design team will include designers who worked with the Downtown Streetscape Ad-Hoc Public Art Committee and councilors Ruth Causey and Christopher McMorran. Starner said representatives from Maxtivity Arts & Crafts Creative Space, Visit Corvallis and the city of Corvallis will be invited to provide art and marketing expertise.
The move toward the creation of a logo surfaced out of the city’s need to find a new website platform, which would include a redesign.
“Our current website company was bought out by another provider and they have changed a lot of their platform, so that’s going to be more expensive for us,” Starner said, adding that other options and new platforms are being explored.
A request for proposals was issued for the website redesign with submissions due by Aug. 29.
“It would be best and most cost effective if we had our logo and our chosen colors before we get to that process,” Starner said. “But we have a timeline … because they’re going to stop supporting our website near the end of this year. We’ve been trying to push that out as far as we can.”
If a new platform and host is not in place by the end of the year, the city’s website would not just disappear but support would end and functionality issues would arise.
“We really want to get the logo and some colors picked so that we can have that to give to whoever’s going to work on our website,” Starner said.
The city seal, which is an image of the Philomath College building with the Marys River and forest in the foreground and Marys Peak in the background with the year of incorporation, would not go away but would be used exclusively in an official capacity, such as on city documents.
Starner said the hope is to have a final design before the City Council at its November meeting.