The Jefferson County Library has updated its logo.
Executive Director Tony Benningfield said the library’s former logo looked nice but was not very versatile.
“It had like three overlapping pages of three different shades of green and whenever you did an all-white or an all-black version of that, it looked like an acute triangle with three little wavy lines coming out,” he said. “We had trouble putting it on things, marketing ourselves.”
The new logo features the letters, “JCL” short for Jefferson County Library.
“The J is in the form of a book, and the L kind of has three branches coming out of it,” Benningfield said. “Everybody knows a library has books, but we also have technology too. It was originally a tech tree with little circles on it, but we thought, ‘Well, how can we liven this up,’ and we put leaves on it instead and fell in love with it.”
Benningfield said the tree is a nod to the genealogy resources available at the different branches.
“It’s also a nod to branching out and finding out about a new topic or a new genre of books that you might like,” he said.
The former logo was green and black.
“(The new logo is) navy, seafoam and definitely white,” he said. “It gives it a very clean, fresh look.”
Benningfield said he wanted to move away from green.
“If you slap a green logo on a billboard that’s surrounded by trees, it’s going to vanish,” he said. “We were looking for something a little bit brighter.”
Benningfield said the new logo was first added to the library’s website, jeffcolib.org, on May 11, but people still might see the old logo during the transition.
“It’s a process, we’re finding our old logo all over the place,” he said.
Benningfield said the library paid Kristin Hudson Designs $870 to create the new logo.
He said Hudson, the business owner, lives in unincorporated Fenton.
“This consumed a lot of her time, so it was worth every penny,” Benningfield said.
He said Hudson also designed the logo for the “Murder and Mayhem in Jefferson County, Missouri” podcast.