Nothin’ but blue skies in the new Calgary brand

The climate gods had been sort to Calgary boosters, and the clouds parted Wednesday after the spring-stormy days to match their civic rebranding train.

Say goodbye to “Be A part of the Vitality” after about 12 years, and look upward. Calgary will now be “Blue Sky Metropolis.”

Calgary Financial Growth (CED) and its companions have not launched the logos and visible components but to go along with this new model. However predicting its dominant hue is a safer wager than “Maple Leafs lose to Bruins in first spherical.”

And this is how they promoted the occasion the place they launched it. 

Calgary turning blue seems a dramatic transfer away from the town’s long-standing institutional embrace with the color pink. Consider the Calgary Flames, Stampeders, the Calgary Stampede, the Peace Bridge that is ubiquitous in promotional pictures. The outgoing slogan, and the pink hat on the bygone “Coronary heart of the New West” signal, that extra bygone slogan.

When the Peace Bridge was unveiled, this was among the many rationalizations behind making it pink.

What’s blue in Calgary, other than the enormous ring close to the airport, and the map on federal election nights?

Ah sure, the sky. The blueness that residents and guests usually see 333 days per 12 months, CED repeatedly famous Wednesday.

“We’re a metropolis of sudden prospects, the place ambitions are as massive because the blue skies we converge below,” CED head Brad Parry informed reporters.

Throw in references to “blue-sky pondering,” and you have got this new product of assorted focus teams, surveys and intensive consultations with 129 organizations throughout 26 sectors.

Boosters want to intensify the place we’re going and what we’re gaining, and Parry insisted this massive civic rebrand is not a departure from something — not pink, and never “vitality.”

The pink will nonetheless be within the iconography, he stated. Certainly, there was a band of rouge in between the solar and the dominant sky within the new banner picture, a model that he and a number of other organizational leaders stood in entrance of, many sporting daring blue blazers, scarves or eyeglass frames (whereas Parry went gray jacket, black shirt).

He additionally declared this wasn’t an abandonment of the previous tagline’s nod to the oil and fuel sector. “We’ll all the time be the vitality metropolis,” he stated in an interview.

However on the similar time, the town company’s branding evaluate informed officers that too many Calgarians did not really feel that the present slogan lined what they’re doing in a metropolis and world of transition, the place diversification is ever the buzzword.

“We realized that 60 per cent of Calgarians do not feel like they belong in Calgary,” Calgary Arts Growth CEO Patti Pon informed the information convention.

That discovering might jar longtime Calgary residents, but in addition get vigorous nods from newer arrivals.

Inclusion is an enormous a part of this revised Calgary pitch. The consultations and announcement intentionally reached past the normal tourism and enterprise sectors to teams representing immigrant, 2SLGBTQ+ and Indigenous communities.

They emphasised the collective nature of all residing below the identical sky for “Blue Sky Metropolis.”

One would not usually hear remarks a couple of metropolis’s racism and marginalization in an financial builders’ occasion, however Anila Umar of the Centre for Newcomers wasn’t shy about confronting these points at CED’s occasion.

“For me, the entire blue-sky piece of that is: How will we work along with that hope?” she stated. “As a result of with out hope, with out working collectively, we’re by no means going to really obtain that supreme.”

Who is not conscious of this metropolis’s blue-sky tendencies, and Calgary’s routine optimism and sense of chance? However to acknowledge that’s to additionally know there is a binary right here in Growth and Bust Metropolis.

Because the late singer Prince and any Calgarian this week can testify, typically it snows in April.  Final 12 months, the wildfires introduced the town a distressing glut of smoke-sky days, and this 12 months is threatening to be extra dire.

Anticipate to listen to a bunch of quippers ask “What occurred to Blue Sky Metropolis?” each time Calgary betrays that moniker.

However, Parry notes, the haze and clouds finally raise and the blue returns. (In instances of wrestle, a metropolis all the time carries that religion, would not it?)

Rebranding efforts all the time provoke debate, dialog and cries from those that grew keen on current slogans. It occurred a decade in the past because the “vitality” tagline dawned.

Generally, slogans get tried out — blue-skied? — and do not work. Fifteen years in the past, a CED rebranding train got here up with “The Most Dynamic Metropolis in Canada,” and that shortly discovered historical past’s dustbin. 

Poor Edmonton, in the meantime, retains attempting, and nothing ever appears to stay.

Calgary’s leaders intend to go massive with this new id, unveil it throughout varied native businesses in coming months. Some will see in it an limitless expanse of potential, whereas it should make others really feel blue.

And sure, we writers may have a discipline day with puns. Countless prospects there, too.