USAID pays $100,000 for new logo

In the midst of a massive relief effort in South Asia, the U.S. Agency for International Development released a redesigned logo Monday that is easier to read and to reproduce.

The new logo was first used on boxes of humanitarian aid that have been sent to South Asia as part of the billions of dollars in U.S. tsunami relief efforts. The logo features a version of the previous seal that was last updated in 2001 and a tagline that references the American people as the providers of the aid.

The redesign cost $100,000 and includes printing guides explaining the proper use of the new logo, design expenses and 15 communications templates.

"The U.S. government spent $14 billion in aid on foreign assistance through USAID in 2004," said Joanne Giordano, a senior adviser to the USAID administrator. "We've spent $100,000 to ensure the people in the countries where we operate know that the schools, roads, clinics, and computers they are using are from the American people …. I did a lot of the work in-house. This one was very cheap, very cost-effective."

Giordano said the history of the USAID emblem goes back to the end of World War II and USAID's origin in the Marshall Plan. At the time, Congress was concerned that the Soviet Union was taking credit for U.S. aid in Europe after World War II, so U.S. packages were marked with an insignia.

Adapted from the Great Seal of the United States, the words "For European Recovery Supplied by the United States of America," were printed in the languages of the recipient countries and placed on aid packages. But a lack of uniformity on labels, decals, metal plates and tags diminished the impact of the message, according to Giordano.

After three redesigns, USAID settled on a seal in 2001 that preserved the shield and the clasped hands emblem inside a circle. The addition of the brand mark and a sharper image of the handclasp make the seal easier to read and reproduce Giordano said.

In the previous version, the handclasp looked like an 80-year-old man's hands, Giordano said, and the new image is generic and more easily duplicated. "Sometimes it looked like a knotted rope," she added. "The great symbol of the handclasp was not getting reproduced, and you see it a lot of places overseas."

In addition to the new seal, a brand mark was added to help identify Americans as the providers of the aid.

The new logo will help build a global brand of American generosity, Giordano said. "The schools and the roads and the clinics and the computers that these people are using, they have to know it was funded by U.S. taxpayers," Giordano said. "If our computers are going into Lebanon, they see a giant Dell mark on it, but they don't know it was from the American people."

The logo design has been a project of the Falls Church, Va.-based marketing-communications firm JDG Communications since Sept. 2002 and its release in the middle of the substantial relief efforts in South Asia following last month's tsunamis was a coincidence, according to Len Johnson, president of JDG.

JDG also produced a 94-page Graphic Standards Manual for USAID, which includes templates for letters, newsletters and PowerPoint presentations. The logo will carry the name of the destination country's next to the brand name.

The new logo was presented Monday morning during a press conference at USAID headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building where President Bush praised the work of USAID and nongovernmental organizations in the tsunami relief efforts. Bush said the international community has been generous and compassionate, and "the men and women of USAID have been at the center of that response."

"USAID personnel in the region responded the very day the disaster struck," Bush said. "Your fellow colleagues and yourselves have been working day and night, 24 hours a day and we're grateful."