It’s my great pleasure to announce that Seattle’s arts office has a new brand, complete with new logo and tagline and perhaps best of all, a (slightly) revised name: Office of Arts & Culture Seattle.

Personally, I’m really excited about this project because I believe that our office is doing great, fantastic work in our community – we’re working to make Seattle a better place to be an artist, work at a cultural organization and enjoy the abundance of art offerings our city produces. But when I started here, I didn’t feel like we were telling that story well enough. Our logo had (admittedly) been designed without much process and our name was clunky and so hard to say that most people shorted it to the acronym “OACA” (pronounced something like “o-walk-a”), which if you hear without reference sounds a bit like somebody sneezing.  

How we got to this point was confusing as well: originally we started out as the Seattle Arts Commission in 1971. In the 2000s we moved to Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, and then several years later Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs.  And here we are changing it again – but this time I believe we’re acting on a more strategic decision. We’re getting rid of “affairs” (no need to sound pretentious) and presenting a logo that takes it down to the basics – A & C for Arts and Culture.  We also have a new tagline, “Making Art Work,” that encompasses both what we do as well as our attitude.

While I’m incredibly proud of this new brand system for our office, at the end of the day a logo is just a stand-in for the product and service that it represents. So we’re going to get back to work supporting the artists and organizations that make Seattle a special place. I hope you keep an eye out for the new mark and if you do, let us know where you saw it and how it looks.

And if you’re talking about us in the community, I beg of you: please call us the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, or if you have to shorten it, Seattle’s Arts Office. If I never again hear “OACA,” this project will be a success.  

– Calandra Childers, Communications Manager

P.S. If  you are a partner organization looking to update your materials, you can find every possible size/color combo/file type of the new logo here.