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Curtis Gilbert

New Minneapolis sailboat logo hits the shoals

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sails

The single sailboat appears to be sunk.

Minneapolis City Council members Friday took a different tack on changing the city's distinctive sailboat logo. The city's communications office had wanted to move to a more streamlined one-sailboat logo, following the corporate trend toward simpler symbols embraced by blue chip behemoths like Apple, Walmart and Starbucks.

City council members on Friday, though, turned back the single sailboat in favor of keeping the city's current two-boat logo. Members expressed concerns that moving to a single boat would create confusion. There's also no money to sandblast its old emblem off every sign, vehicle and manhole cover where it currently appears.

"We'll end up in a situation where a decade, two decades, three decades down the road, we're going to have two logos out there, which my understanding from a branding standpoint is probably not the best thing," Council Member Andrew Johnson said.

The logo began with a single sailboat back in the 1970s, and its companion has been around since at least the 1980s.

The plan to revise the design led some council members to question whether the watercraft was the right symbol for a city more than 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean.

"I don't support the sailboats as our city's image," said Council Member Alondra Cano. "I don't know that that represents my constituents or the people who live in my ward."

Council Member John Quincy was the most vocal advocate for the one-sailboat solution.

"I don't personally believe anybody's going to be confused by the fact that there's a sailboat on a regulatory services pool car in our fleet, not knowing which city of Minneapolis they're part of," Quincy said.