Obama recovery plan's logo gets a critique

President Obama's latest weapon in the battle to jump-start the economy? A round logo with splashes of red and blue and a scattering of stars. The Obama "O" logo helped brand the then-senator on the campaign trail, and now Mode Project, the same Chicago firm that had a hand in that design, has returned to help him brand the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The program's logo is a circle with three elements: The top half is a field of blue with eight white stars lined up on the left hand side and the Web address "RECOVERY.GOV" on the right. The lower half of the circle is divided between two gears on a field of red on the right, and a three-leafed seedling on a green background on the left. The first impression is of something closer to a Boy Scout merit badge than a government logo.

Obama unveiled the logo, along with the one for the Department of Transportation's Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, or TIGER, program, at a news conference March 3. (That same day, the Boy Scouts of America visited the Oval Office to present Obama with that organization's annual Report to the Nation. Coincidence? You decide.)

"When you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible, let it be a reminder that our government, your government is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery," Obama said.

OK, so we know what it symbolizes -- but what does it mean? (For now we'll just let the TIGER logo lie, it looks like it belongs on a box of Frosted Flakes, saying something like: "This economic recovery plan is grrrrrrrreat!")

Since the folks at Mode declined to help us decode the logo (citing the firm's client confidentiality policy even though, technically, we the people are footing the bill), we collared a couple of experts to help us parse the pieces: Armin Vit, a New York-based graphic designer who specializes in corporate rebranding, and L.A.-based artist Shepard Fairey, who's learned a thing or two about the power of iconic imagery, first with his "Obey Giant" logo and more recently with the Obama "Hope" poster (for which he is embroiled in a copyright infringement case with the Associated Press).

First impressions

Vit: "My first response was 'Wow, is this really a government logo?' Most government logos don't make any sense, and this one looks really competent, very clean and straightforward."