Logo design can be a complex endeavor. You need to marry shapes, colors, tones, and typography into a single unified whole that conveys personality, reflects your identity, is relevant to your audience, and pleases the powers-that-be.
What I call the most recent “Teutonic logo blunder” comes from the East Side Elementary School in Marietta, Georgia, which recently unveiled its new look. Immediately some parents started to complain the eagle looks way too similar to Nazi symbolism used in Germany during the Third Reich. These parents are right. It’s as if the designers turned to Nazi Germany for inspiration!
Stacy Efrat, whose children go to East Side, was quoted saying: “. . . I’m like, Oh my God, that logo looks like the Nazi symbol. How could this possibly have happened? I could not understand it, really. I still don’t understand how it happened.”
It happened because people don’t pay attention to history. The same thing happened in my own town when the Bethlehem Soccer Club launched a new logo in 2008, back when my kids still played for the club teams. When I first saw the logo, I recognized the similarities to Nazi symbolism immediately. Some of us objected. Nothing happened. To this day, the logo stands.
In the Georgia case, the school district is “pausing” its rollout of the new logo after a flurry of complaints. Were school officials oblivious or just lazy? Is it simply unfortunate the eagle happens to be an American icon as well as a Nazi symbol? If the Georgia school officials performed an internet search on eagle symbology they would almost immediately have gotten results to have them hitting the “pause” button much earlier in the process.
Come on, people, do a little homework when designing logos. By the way, antisemitic incidents in Georgia more than doubled over the past year.