Columbia has a new $90K city logo. What do you think of it?

Columbia has a new, blue logo, and you can buy it on T-shirts at the city’s gift-shop.

Columbia leaders Tuesday unveiled a roughly $90,000 city rebranding project that included a new logo of a blue crescent moon shaded in the same color palette as the city’s flag, with the tagline “Together, we are Columbia.”

But don’t be confused — this new logo and tagline are separate from the Experience Columbia tourism bureau’s tagline and logo for the city and the half dozen other iterations of the city’s marketing efforts in recent years.

This newest campaign by the city is separate from Experience Columbia’s efforts to dub the city “The Real Southern Hotspot,” a tourism marketing campaign that was unveiled in 2017 after $150,000 of work.

Before that, the city was “Famously hot (surprisingly cool),“ which was launched by the visitor’s bureau for about $70,000.

And in 2004, the city’s slogan went from “Columbia, a Capital place to be,” to “Where friendliness flows,” after a different $70,000 campaign from the same firm that coined “Virginia is for Lovers.” But all of those efforts were done by the Midland’s tourism bureau, and not the city government.

The city paid Greenville-based Crawford Agency roughly $93,000 between November and February for the work on the city’s new campaign.

Experience Columbia and the city government are separate entities and pay for projects with separate funds, but Experience Columbia does get some city money from accommodations taxes. Despite the two being separate entities, City Councilwoman Aditi Bussells said she hopes to see more brand cohesion across the city and its various municipal-adjacent agencies.

She also said she might push for another slogan reconsideration — she loved “Famously Hot” — as part of her campaign to overhaul how the city sells itself and sees itself.

“I think one of the biggest reasons why we’ve seen a deterrent to some of the kind of growth of people wanting to come here, stay here, live here, play here has been our own sense of pride,” Bussells said.

When Bussells first moved to the city, she said she heard so many times how the best thing about Columbia is that it’s easy to leave — “just two hours from the mountains or the beach!”

She said getting all of the city departments and, hopefully, other agencies on the same page about aesthetics is the next step in boosting city morale and communicating to outsiders that Columbia has itself together.

Experience Columbia did not make a representative available for an interview, but in an email, communications Vice President Kelly Barbrey wrote, “We work closely with the City to share our concepts and assets and look forward to continuing to collaborate with them as they launch their new brand.”

“One of the things I’ve asked the Mayor, and that we have been working on (is) there are too many fiefdoms in Columbia,” Bussells said. “That’s a culture that I would like to see change, where everybody has just always done their own things.”