Dobelle takes logos back to drawing board
By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer
Responding to overwhelming opposition to the proposed logos for the University of Hawai'i system, UH President Evan Dobelle today pulled the plug on both, saying "they don't work" and don't meet his common sense rule.
"I think we have to go back out again, and the Board (of Regents) has to make that determination of how that's done," he said today.
Dobelle said he believes there needs to be a "branding" logo for the 10-campus UH system and said he would ask the Board of Regents to advise him on how to proceed.
He praised the process of selecting the logo.
A large, systemwide committee that included students, faculty and staff made the choices.
Dobelle said that a brand logo does not bump use of the official UH seal which he said is "inviolate" for official documents, or the Warrior "H" which he said is also "inviolate" for use by the school's teams.
Professor John Wisnosky, chairman of the UH-Manoa Art Department and a critic of both logos, said Dobelle's action was "fantastic ... very good news.
"I have a very long letter to the Board of Regents letting them know it doesn't serve the dignity, tradition or future of the university to have either one of those," said Wisnosky. "From a departmental point of view, it does smack the students and alums ... in the face when they could have come up with something more appropriate."
Wisnosky said he hoped a new committee would be formed and that local designers would be considered.
UH art professor Ron Kowalke, another outspoken critic of the logos, called Dobelle's action "courageous," and said "it's the power of the people.
"Most people think they can't stop anything that happens within the university because they're administrators," said Kowalke. "They make mistakes, too; and this is a giant mistake, and they saw it."
A systemwide logo would be an advertising tool essentially for use on brochures to unify the entire system, and to create an image to attract students from Asia, the Pacific and the Mainland.
"The key is we want to get it right," said Dobelle. "Nobody has done anything wrong, except people can take a look at those logos and common sense tells you they're not going to work."
Dobelle said that in the process of beginning to analyze more than 1,300 e-mail responses, "more than twice as many opposed both" than favored either one. He also said the firm that produced them, Robert Rytter and Associates of Baltimore, Md., created 20 logos for the project and all could be looked at again.
But he also suggested that Rytter might need to compete with others to create another logo and that money still unspent from the initial $82,000 contract could be used for that purpose.
He also said that the process should pick the best logo, regardless of who creates it.
"Would I like to see a local person, of course I would. But (basing decisions) on that (criteria), you never would have hired an Ed Cadman or a June Jones.
"This is something that is complicated because everybody understands logos, or think they do. Everybody has their opinion."
Dobelle said that he was personally "ambivalent" about both logos, and when it became clear that his own ambivalence was shared by so many others, it was time to take another look.
