This is what a semiquincentennial looks like
America has a 250th birthday coming up, and that birthday now has a logo
The United States of America has been the United States of America since 1776. You know that. The current year is 2023. You know that, too. What you also know, once you stop to do the math, is that the pairing of those dates means a big anniversary looms. Yes, the US of A will soon celebrate its 250th birthday.
What you likely didn’t know, unless you’re a very serious Scrabble player or truly dedicated doer of crossword puzzles, is that the word for 250th anniversary is semiquincentennial.
If coming up with that word would be a challenge for most anybody, an even bigger challenge would be how to render visually the meaning of that word and the hub-bub that comes in its wake. Obscure polysyllabic abstractions tend not to inspire the pictorial imagination.
Earlier this month, the New York design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv did present a rendering. In fact, it’s the rendering, since the firm’s design is the official logo for America’s Semiquincentennial.
The firm knows from logos. It’s done them for a long list of clients. They include the US Open Tennis Championships, NBC, PBS, the Smithsonian Institution, Warner Bros., National Geographic, State Farm insurance, Showtime, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Those are some very high-profile names. They also represent a very wide range of activities. High profile and wide range are qualities that have a certain relevance to designing a logo for a nation’s 250th. There’s also a legacy aspect. It was Chermayeff & Geismar, as the firm then was, that designed the logo for America’s last big-deal birthday, the 1976 Bicentennial.
The shared parentage of those logos makes comparing them all the more interesting. But first it might be useful to discuss logos in general.
A logo is the visual equivalent of a theme song: You recognize it without really paying attention to it — or needing to. It’s conceptually economical that way; and a good one goes beyond economy to elegance. Indication, implication, and association matter more than actual description. Paradoxical as this may sound, the simplicity of a good logo is never reductive. Instead, it’s an extension or enlargement.
A successful logo needs to be legible, distinctive, and attractive. If it’s not legible, it’s confusing. If it’s not distinctive, it goes unnoticed. If it’s not attractive, it gets ignored, which is worse than going unnoticed. Being ignored is avoidance activated.
There’s a tricky balance being maintained. You’re supposed to get used to a logo, since that means you’ve accepted the message it’s sending/product it’s selling. If you get too used to it, though, that means you’ve stopped recognizing it and that message is no longer registering.
An example of an extremely successful logo — and it’s certainly pertinent ’centennial-wise — is the US flag. It could hardly be simpler. Three colors, that’s it, and no text. One overt symbol, the stars, each representing a state. A design element, the stripes, that’s also a less overt symbol: Each represents one of the original 13 states. The flag is adaptable, so much so that the upperleft-hand quadrant (which nicely contrasts with the dominant horizontality of the stripes) now accommodates a grid of 50 white stars, having originally shown 13 of them, in a circle. Legible, distinctive, and attractive? Definitely.
There’s only so much a logo can do on its own. No matter how nicely wrapped an empty box might be, that wrapping still covers a box with nothing in it. Having a roster of such famous clients is lucrative for Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. It’s also advantageous, since their fame gives the firm a lot more to work with. The more there is in the box, the more conceptual possibilities there are for wrapping it.
The two ’centennial logos are a case in point. The 250th anniversary may or may not prove to be an empty box. There’s still two-plus years to find out. At this stage, though, the 200th “box” was already very full. For whatever reason — a stronger interest in history then, providing an antidote to the ongoing Watergate scandal, the greater authority that numbers ending in ’00 have in this culture — the Bicentennial was ubiquitous well before July 4, 1976.
CBS, for example, ran a nightly series of 60-second “Bicentennial Minutes” in prime time for over two years. Don’t expect a series of “Semiquincentennial Minutes.” Even if there were such a thing, the concepts of network TV and prime time and viewing are so different now as to make anything similar hard to imagine. Would those “Minutes” stream on Netflix, YouTube, or TikTok?
It’s a sign of this greater interest that the Bicentennial logo was unveiled in 1971, a full five years before the actual event. The logo was designed by Bruce N. Blackburn. Blackburn was co-creator, with Richard Danne, of another famous design of that era, NASA’s “worm” logo. That logo, which debuted in 1975, is making a serious comeback.
Both designs are very much of their visual moment. That’s one of the more intriguing aspects of logos, how they strive to be enduring (the Ford and Coca-Cola logos are still going strong a century or more after being introduced) even as they inevitably bespeak the era of their arrival. That interplay between continuity and contemporaneity is another element in the balancing act that a good logo entails.
Certainly, the NASA and Bicentennial logos have their decade of origin written all over them: that ’70s curviness! It’s hard to imagine something more intrinsically ’70s than the way those curves in the Bicentennial logo, which themselves form a star, surround the crisp angles and lines of that internal star, practically swaddling them.
Also, those curves are in color. Because of advances in technology, color became much more common in advertising and media during the ’60s. Until 1968, there were separate Academy Awards for black-and-white and color cinematography. By the ’70s, color had simply come to be taken for granted. Now it’s so commonplace … did you even notice the red frame around the 250th logo?
That ’70s for-granted-ness is evident in the boldness of the red in the NASA logo and, of course, in the use of red and blue to go with white in the Bicentennial logo. It’s not just that a black-andwhite version of the latter would have been almost a contradiction in visual terms: offering three cheers for the redwhite-and-blue in black-and-white? No way. It’s also that it would look so … drab. The logo really is celebratory — so much so that it’s easy to overlook how those curves form their own star.
The logo for the 250th has its own curviness, but it’s nowhere near as assertive. The curvature of that red-whiteand-blue ribbon is even more structural than decorative. It also does double duty conceptually, ribbons having associations with both patriotism and celebration. Furthermore, the ribbon being unbroken highlights the idea of unity — the United States is united, no? — and these days that idea bears emphasizing.
Additionally, it has this in common with the Bicentennial logo: Both are visual puns. The earlier one had those curves forming a star — two, in fact, outer and inner. The new one has the ribbon forming “250.” In both cases, a quick glance might not reveal the double meaning. Yet logos are in the quickglance business. So both logos have something else in common. To ensure the message gets across each ’centennial logo includes text, with black letters.
The Bicentennial one has multiple words and a set of dates. Also the text is, yes, curved. The font is Helvetica (a balance, as it would turn out, between contemporaneity and continuity, not that Blackburn could have known this). With 250, there’s just “America,” placed at the top, in a custom-drawn font. Even though the text consists of that one word alone, it’s more assertive than the multiple words in the Bicentennial logo, thanks to the weight of the type and its superior placement.
The weird thing is that that assertiveness feels even more plaintive than it does declarative. This gets back to that business of needing to emphasize unity. The biggest difference between the two logos has less to do with appearance and more with the society each is meant to represent.
This makes the communicative challenge for the new logo much greater. It’s not just that the word and concept of semiquincentennial are unfamiliar and thus less marketable (not to sound crass or anything). It’s also that there’s another product being represented: the country observing the anniversary as well as the anniversary itself.
For all that America was in tough shape 50 years ago — Watergate, energy crisis, rampant inflation, the fall of South Vietnam (in April 1975) — there was a much greater sense of unity. Now? That ribbon may be curved like that not because it’s waving in the breeze — flags do that, not ribbons — but because it’s blowing in the wind.
It’s hard to imagine something more intrinsically ’70s than the way the curves in the Bicentennial logo, which themselves form a star, surround the crisp angles and lines of that internal star. The logo for the 250th has its own curviness, but it’s nowhere near as assertive.