Blackwater Softens Logo

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Blackwater Softens Logo

James Joyner | Thursday, October 25, 2007

Reeling from news portraying the company as reckless killers, Blackwater USA has changed its corporate logo.

In the private security business that has made Blackwater USA virtually a household name, being tough is part of the game. Not just for its rifle-carrying contractors but also for its corporate logo.

Well, not anymore. The well-armed men remain, but the company’s roughneck logo — a bear’s paw print in a red crosshairs, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam — has undergone a publicity-conscious, corporate scrubbing.

The company said the decision to update its logo was made long before Sept. 16, the day a Blackwater team guarding a State Department convoy in Baghdad fatally shot 17 Iraqis near a bustling traffic circle. But the new logo did not appear on Blackwater’s Web site (www.blackwaterusa.com), until after the incident, a Blackwater spokeswoman said.

The rifle-scope crosshairs so obvious in the old Blackwater logo have been reduced to a set of horizontal elipses that bracket, but no longer enclose, the paw print, which has also changed to more closely resemble an actual bear-paw imprint. The original Blackwater logo had thick white serif lettering draped over the crosshairs on a menacing black field. The new logo separates the image and the letters, which now appear in buttoned-down sans-serif black and slightly italicized on a white field.

Though the red elipses in the new logo retain the horizontal crosshairs, the overall look is far less “kick your butt” and much more “quarterly report,” some branding experts said. The new logo, which began to appear on some Blackwater material in late July, may also speak volumes about the company’s desire to begin its second decade on a more anodyne note. “I would say it’s a highly significant change; they’re repositioning themselves,” said Lauren Miller, the owner of MDesign, a graphic design firm in New York. “The old logo suggests that they’re targeting people. The new logo is a more ambiguous, more safe corporate logo.” “The subtle changes mean everything here,” Ms. Miller said, “by eliminating the scope of a sniper’s rifle.”

Indeed, the new logo is more evocative of the Clemson Tigers than a mercenary outfit.

The editors and readers of Danger Room have been submitting their own suggestions, which Sharon Weinberger has collected. My favorites:

She’s accepting new submissions and tallying the votes for those currently on display.

About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.

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