Spain tourism got one years ago, now Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism has a new logo. Its price: $10K.

Diana sends me a link to the pitiful story. The logo was designed by a design studio by the name of ’Cummings & Good’ and their price tag of 10,000 was the highest among the for agencies invited to pitch for the job.


Preliminary design... you know what this means: free pitch! Free as in working and never get paid because... well... they didn’t like it. Ten grand is the ID budget of a start-up in Romania.

But wait, there is more to it. There is a gentleman, Marc S. Ryan, the budget director for the state Office of Policy and Management, who criticized the tourism commission’s expenditure with the following wise thoughts:


I cannot get it. Can you? “It disturbs me that they spent any kind of money on designing a logo.” What the hell happens? America is like a home to graphic design and branding. Or is this a glimpse of, um, the other America?

The project is wrongly thought from its very first step – asking design studios to send some logos in?!? – it seems there’s no trace of a possibility to get a brand consultancy on board, with a price tag within a whole different order of magnitude. No money? On the contrary: “The $10,000 appropriation comes from the tourism agency’s $24 million operating budget, a figure that national tourism experts describe as ’underfunded.’” With a 24 Mio they could hardly claim that they have no money.

No positioning. No viable promise. No strategy. But they do have now what they paid for: a ten grands logo on a stack of new businesscards. Why give a damn about the blown opportunity to talk to the world about how Connecticut really is?