Symbolizing Needham
• After months of brainstorming, designing and reviewing, the town is seeking feedback on two potential logos that would help rebrand the town.
The Needham town seal is hidden in plain sight, appearing on road signs, trash cans, town vehicles and elsewhere. Across town, many of those seals could be replaced by an entirely new design.
The Branding and Town Seal Committee, formed in the fall, was charged with designing a town logo and reexamining the town seal to update Needham’s identity. After drafting and narrowing down the logo designs and colors, the committee is hoping to garner community input through a poll released Thursday, which is open until July 12.
The logo would not outright replace the town seal, but rather be used in place of the seal in certain situations. That could be on business cards, clothing, trash barrels, stationary, signage and more.
In the design, the Town Hall is represented by its identifiable cupola, and a curved line at the bottom of the logo represents a bridge, given Needham’s proximity to the Charles River. The Needham lettering, below the cupola, is reminiscent of the Town Hall windows, as there are seven letters in Needham and seven rounded windows. The logo also includes 1711, the year Needham was founded.
Residents will decide between two color options: a light blue-blue colorway or a yellow-blue one. The committee narrowed the current choices down from four, which included a silver-blue and a gold-blue. Committee members also previously considered brick red on silver, forest green with silver and yellow as well as purple and green.
Last month, logo designer David Linde, who sits on the committee, had pitched incorporating other Needham imagery, such as the blue tree, the pansy — the town flower — and a picket fence to emphasize a neighborly feel, but those elements did not make the final draft.
Select Board Chair Kevin Keane, who is also a member of the Branding and Town Seal Committee, shared the logo’s progress at the Select Board’s June 11 meeting. Keane explained the logo is a “way to tell the story, to create placemaking and communicate to your people.”
Not everything warrants a town seal, he said, and a logo could be a more suitable alternative.
“For instance, on the Needham yellow trash bags, we have the town seal, so it’s like official town trash,” Keane said. “We don’t need that, but we could put perhaps an icon.”
The logo would be placed everywhere except where the town seal would be appropriate, such as on official documentation.
“Most places where you see a seal that’s not on a document in the town clerk’s office is going to have a logo in this format,” Town Manager Kate Fitzpatrick said at the committee’s June 11 meeting. “But it’s going to take a long time to get there, and we’re going to have to start and get going.”
A $50,000 earmark in the state budget would go toward implementing the logo and future seal, Fitzpatrick said.
The Branding and Town Seal Committee is composed of 10 members across town entities, as well as a member of the Massachusett Natick Praying Indians. They will meet again July 16 to review the results of the poll and possibly move forward with a design. The town seal would require a vote at Town Meeting, but discussions of its potential redesign are ongoing.
In Linde’s view, creating a logo could better engage Needhamites.
“This will help with town pride and everything else,” Linde said earlier this month.
