Let’s face it, San Jose hardly has a reputation for being cool or trendy. The city isn’t weird like Austin, hip and gritty like Oakland or kooky like San Francisco. When you meet people from Boston or Chicago, they love to tell you about their city. But how often do you hear somebody boast about being from San Jose?
That may be changing, thanks in no small part to a dynamic logo the city quietly rolled out nearly two years ago. Since then, it’s been plastered on everything from T-shirts and laptop covers to a flag atop a downtown building and a shipping container in Plaza de Cesar Chavez. For the first time since well, maybe ever, people are showing off a San Jose look that goes beyond Sharks teal.
“People have pride in our city and community, and this logo is tapping into that,” said Teresa Alvarado, director of urban planning group SPUR San Jose, who likes the movement and fun of the design. “It captures the energy and enthusiasm of our residents.”
If you haven’t seen the logo yet, it won’t be long before you do. It’s being used in signs at Mineta San Jose International Airport and Team San Jose — the public-private partnership that handles the city’s tourism marketing — has incorporated it into its materials.
But perhaps the most surprising place the logo has shown up is on Jake McCluskey’s leg. A fixture in San Jose’s beer scene, McCluskey recently completed an astonishing quest to run every street within San Jose’s city limits, a months-long trek that spanned some 2,300 miles. He wanted a way to commemorate the feat. He first thought of getting a tattoo of the official city seal, but he grew enamored of the new logo and asked Mune, a tattoo artist at Blacksuit Tattoo, to add it to his left calf.
“I loved the design immediately, and I loved the symbolism of it,” McCluskey said. “It was the perfect way to celebrate what I did with that run. But to me this talks about the future, too. A lot is happening here.”
When word of McCluskey’s gesture reached San Jose City Hall, it flabbergasted Deputy City Manager Kim Walesh, whose office of economic development launched the logo as part of a re-branding of the city’s identity. “To put it on your body to live forever as this sign of love and attachment,” she said. “Can you believe that?”
People who see the logo probably don’t associate it with city government, and Walesh is fine with that. It won’t supplant the official city logo, which features a sunburst icon and the slogan “The Capital of Silicon Valley.” The new logo, intended to capture the city’s spirit in typography, is meant to be seen on skateboards, not stationery.
As Walesh’s office talked about how to refashion San Jose’s image, a nationwide search was conducted to find a design partner. While South Bay designers were considered, a panel ultimately chose Native Digital, a design firm based in Kansas City, Mo. Founder Justin Watkins spent months interviewing various people from different walks of life in San Jose to get a sense of how residents saw the city and how they wanted the outside world to view it.
The Knight Foundation — which has been actively working for several years to foster civic engagement in San Jose — contributed a $125,000 grant to cover half the project’s cost. The result was a series of slogans — “Make Your Mark,” “Start Something” and “Never Finished” — that alluded to San Jose’s creative, DIY culture and to the idea that this is a place where anyone with a good idea can still make a difference.
The logo went through a few drafts before Native presented the city with the finished product. The letters are meant to meld street art style with a smooth, corporate look that includes flourishes that speak to the city’s roots as a Spanish pueblo. The curved, widescreen shape evokes the valley itself. There’s an accent over the “e” — a grammatical no-no as capital letters are not accented in Spanish — but Walesh told a story that should defuse nitpickers.
She was having a meeting with a young man who noticed the logo displayed in her office as he was leaving. He told her that he was born and raised the city’s East Side and thanked her for including the accent. “It gave me goosebumps because it meant something to him,” she said. If everyone else likes it, that’s cool, too.
Bonus: The accent on the logo bears a strong resemblance to a shark fin.
Rather than a big public launch, T-shirts and stickers with the logo and slogans were handed out at events, given to city staff, distributed to artists and dropped off at coffee shops to see if the idea would catch on. It did, and the biggest evidence of that — aside from Jake McCluskey’s leg — was when word filtered back that one shop had ripped off the design and was selling shirts on its own.
The city’s working on having Team San Jose begin licensing merchandise with the logo, like hats, hoodies and water bottles, that could be available soon through online stores or gift shops at the airport. Shirts also were made available to players for the Sharks and the Earthquakes, and the city and the Quakes are looking into ways to incorporate the logo into the team’s marketing efforts.
“I think people take pride in the communities that have strong identities,” Walesh said. “There’s a relationship that people have with their city. It’s a collective pride — “We Are San Jose” — but what is it that we are? We’re trying to answer that question.”
