Logos have been released for Calgary’s new brand and identity – Blue Sky City – and they’ll be rolled out in a big way at the annual First Flip breakfast.

The logos are part of an overall rebrand of the City of Calgary that was initially launched on April 17, with a promise of visual cues for the Blue Sky City yet to come.

Traditional beadwork provides the foundation for the new visual elements, with individual beads – suns – coming together for a larger ‘C’ element. The beadwork is meant to symbolize Calgary as a place where different people, ideas, cultures come together for a greater City.

Variations of the new logos and brand include Calgary’s traditional colour of red but are anchored in the blue of the sky and yellow for the sun. Along with the sky, blue is meant to represent ‘blue sky thinking’, and yellow symbolizes optimism and a bright future.

“If you think about Calgary, as a community, we have these amazing individual stories,” said Brad Parry, president and CEO of Calgary Economic Development.

“When you put them together, they tell you this amazing, strong, vibrant community. When you look at the beadwork, or tapestry, or even mosaics of historicals, they come together to tell this amazing sort of story of our culture, our heritage, our past and our future.”

Parry said the beadwork treatment for the logo complemented the Blue Sky City and the open canvas that Calgary has for the future.

“For us, this notion of using these beadworks to tell our story together, but having a latitude to have different organizations reflect it in their own way was so strong for us that we couldn’t pass it up,” Parry said.

Tourism Calgary President and CEO Alisha Reynolds said that as a city evolves, so too must its brand. Research done by both CED and Tourism Calgary showed that as the city’s demographic changed, the old branding – Be Part of the Energy – didn’t resonate with many citizens.

“This turbocharges our excitement, and our ability to do this work of selling and promoting Calgary to national and international visitors and investors,” Reynolds said.

“For us, we’re very excited about the way that this brand is coming together and very excited about how Calgarians will start to see them in the community, too.”

Bringing the community together to help move it forward

Parry said that after the initial announcement of the Blue Sky City brand, he’d heard some negative comments, but largely it was positive.

“For the most part, people have come back and said, ‘I get it. That makes sense. I do understand what that means,’” he said.

“One of the things we talk about is you talk to anybody whose left the city and you ask them what do they miss the most? The first thing I’ll tell you is they miss the blue skies. They miss being part of that.”

Reynolds, who wasn’t a part of the initial rollout, as she was named the new CEO on May 6, said she was asked by the Tourism Calgary board what she thought of the new brand.

“As soon as I heard Blue Sky City I thought perfect, this is Calgary. This is hard work, innovation, creative thinking, doing things way outside of the box. So, the business sense of Blue Sky City makes a lot of sense to me,” she said.

“Then, my very favourite thing about living in Calgary, which is many people’s very favorite thing, is that we get 333 days of sunshine here and we truly are authentically a Blue Sky City. We’re the sunniest major city in Canada. We have that natural truth to the story of Blue Sky City as well as the business connotation.”

The designs were the result of work and consultation with 129 organizations across 26 sectors. Thus far, $1.7 million has been spent on the rebranding project, money that Reynolds said is an investment in the city.

“It’s very important to have a relevant brand when we go overseas, when we travel through the country and we tell the story of Calgary,” she said.

“We want to tell that story from a place of authenticity and optimism.”

The logos and branding are available to all CED and Tourism Calgary partners, allowing them to use the tools to tell their own story, Parry said.

Both organizations will continue to expand the rollout of the new brand to various platforms and with public delivery. Parry said getting the community on board was a big measure of success, beyond that of seeing more visitors or economic development.

“Perceptions take time, and it’s consistency of message and repeating of that message throughout,” Parry said.

“For us, it’ll be community adoption and slowly changing those perceptions for people to start to see and understand what blue sky stands for, and what it means and why they should invest in our city like we invest in ourselves.”