Arizona is known as the Grand Canyon State, but its new brand doesn’t lean too heavily into just one (albeit it stunning) landmark.
Instead, the new logo and visual identity for Arizona’s Office of Tourism and state government, which launched this week, manages to represent the state at large. It’s packed with icons that represent the state and its residents, including a Native American symbol called a mandala. And a new, turquoise “AZ” logo lockup, set behind copper mountains, is already up on the tourism office’s website. Overall, the new logo is a big improvement from its previous one, which was so generic it could be an interchangeable template for just about any state if you swapped out the text and the state graphic.
One of the primary goals of the rebrand was to promote tourism recovery in the state, which hasn’t fully rebounded since the COVID-19 pandemic. The new brand “enables us to compete with more established, well-defined tourism brands such as Pure Michigan and New Mexico True,” Josh Coddington, director of communications and public information officer for the Arizona Office of Tourism, tells Fast Company.
To design the new identity, the team behind the rebrand spent about 10 months interviewing more than 2,000 Arizonans statewide face-to-face, in digital meetings and in surveys. A deep discovery process helped ensure Casper and his team centered their work around elements that respondents brought up time and time again, like Arizona’s mountains.
Their goal was to understand how Arizonans felt about Arizona, and to learn what details, like colors and symbols, people associated with their state so they could make a visual identity that Arizonans would recognize as their own.
“Everything we do from our messaging to our logo must pass the test of being true, meaningful, and distinctive about Arizona,” says Brad Casper, CEO of Heart & Soul Marketing, the Phoenix agency that designed the new identity.
“After doing this for nine or 10 months, it began to be really clear what we needed to say with the brand,” Casper says. They needed a logo that could be used generically for the entire state, he says, but because Arizona is so big, they wanted options for different regions.
The mountainside in the logo is customizable, with a saguaro cactus for Central Arizona that can be swapped out for a ponderosa pine to represent Northern Arizona, or a hummingbird for Southern Arizona (Sierra Vista, Arizona, is the hummingbird capital of the U.S.). As Hannah Heisler, lead on the project, explained, “Arizona is more than just one famous landmark.”
The mandala was created with Kevin Coochwytewa, a Hopi and Isleta Pueblo artist, and it arranges symbols of the state in a circle, like a saguaro cactus. (The saguaro blossom is the official state flower.) A raincloud represents the Sonoran Desert’s mighty summer monsoon storms. There are also symbols of the state’s past and future within the mandala’s outer rings, like a computer chip for the state’s growing semiconductor manufacturing industry, and a petroglyph hand to symbolize the history of Arizona’s human populations.
Though the logo is packed with small icons, the simplicity of the wordmark and mountain sunrise means it still works from both a distance and in small sizes, even if you don’t notice all the details at first.
The primary colors of the brand are turquoise, a popular color in the state that appears in Native American turquoise jewelry, and copper, which is the color of the star in the state’s flag and represents its position as the top copper-producing state in the U.S.
The abundance of green in the color palette, a pine green for the state’s forests and a lighter desert sage, is meant to challenge outsider perceptions that Arizona is barren and dry. “Our color palette has a lot of green in it,” Casper says. “We actually have the greenest, wettest desert.”
Since the brand will be used across state agencies, it has to have broad appeal and utility; reaching potential tourists, as well as meeting the needs of state employees and residents.
That’s a lot of use cases for a single brand representing such a big, diverse state. But the result is a brand that for Arizonans truly looks like home, whether in Sedona, Tucson, or anywhere in between.