Custer County Logo WARS!
Sentinel Launches Custer County Logo Contest with a CASH PRIZE

by George Gramlich,
Commentary
The new “branding” Custer County logo proposed by the Custer County Economic Development Corporation (i.e., Charles Bogle, and his merry posse), developed as part of a rather expensive, “grant” funded study (that had an underwhelming community response), was not well received by two out of three of our Custer County Commissioners last month. (Guess which Commissioner loved it? Ol’ Prius Tex, of course.) In fact, it was not received well at all.
Since Charles’ “grant machine” CCEDC gang is closely tied on multi-levels with the Dark Skies crew (good folks, but don’t tell us how we can light our ranches, barns and garages), it really wasn’t much of a surprise that their proposed logo would forgo the actual history and beauty of Custer County (mining, ranching, cattle, cowboys, the incredible Sangres, etc.) with something a  little too “dark” and narrowly focused. Yup, instead of a colorful, eye catching, attractive and enticing logo, they came up with a brown, monocolored, almost satanic, design that revolves solely around a minority attraction in the county – that of star watching. Most of it at the Dark Skies observatory on ‘The Bluff’. Narrow minded? Your call.

The catch phrase, or tag line, on the logo is “Dark Skies. Bright Opportunities”. I kid you not. The company the CCEDC hired to do the study obviously missed Marketing 101, which, considering the expense of the “study” (I believe around $30,000) is a bit surprising. But I understand that company was from Boulder, so you get what you pay for.
A fairly large sampling of locals universally panned the proposed logo. “Unattractive”, “boring”, “ugly”, “too narrow”, “amateurish”, “evil”, and “dark” were some of the kinder comments made. It certainly doesn’t project a happy and attractive place. No “happy” face here.
The proposed logo seems to have motivated one of our more interesting valley residents, the one and only Arthur von Boennighausen, to modify a logo he developed years ago for his website that promotes Custer County (westcliffecolorado81252.com, which gets a lot of viewers) as an alternative proposal. Arthur was kind enough to email that logo to me for review and comment.

It looked good but I replied to Arthur that it needed a cow (semi jesting). Arthur, after much contemplative thought (Arthur does a lot of that) sent a revision back to me with a big star in the upper right corner. He said that one lone star was “Algol”, the Demon Star. Being a red neck conservative, I had no clue what that meant so I had to look it up.

EarthSky.Org says that the star Algol might be “the scariest star in all the heavens”. It’s in the constellation Perseus, and was named the mythical monster, Gorgon Medusa, who had snakes instead of hair on his head. Algol is also what they call a “variable” star, which means it “waxes and wanes in brightness”.
So Arthur made funny of the CCEDC/Dark Skies proposed logo with ol’ Algol being his lone star. Arthur did good parodying the Bogle Brigades’ Brown Star Patch with his Algol Demon Star. Pretty funny. Full point for Arthur.
I congratulated Arthur on his graphics accomplishment, but noted the Bogle and his homies also have another visual trademark (or more appropriately, will have). That is the CCEDC’s attempt to top some of the hills and mountains in our county with rather ugly cell/internet towers so our snowflakes (actually mostly forever empty land lots) and iPhone addicted visitors can get better cell/internet access. To the tune of $2 MILLION DOLLARS (and that is just the startup cost)! We’ve gone into Bogle’s boondoggle (just kidding Charles, you know we like you) before, but with low orbit communication satellites coming soon, it will probably be obsolete in just a few years. So, I suggested to Arthur, why not add a few cell towers to his logo and make it perfect.
Arthur did so.
And achieved artistic and comedic perfection:
Arthur’s final version: Algol the Demon Star, and Bogle’s Cell/Internet Towers complete the picture. Which got us to think’n. If Arthur can produce a creative and attractive Custer County logo in mere minutes or hours, this means we don’t need no stink’n Brown Star Patch designed by a BOULDER consulting company for our county logo, but we can do our own. (That being said, I kind of like the official one we have now.)
So, the Sentinel is starting a Custer County Logo Contest with the winner getting a $100 gift certificate to Tony’s Pizza. All types of entries are encouraged. Including truly “straight up” designs, but also funny, comedic, or lampoons. Let’s have some fun. The winner can be from any category, e.g., “straight up”, comedic, etc. We might even have the people vote for the winner rather than having the somewhat jaded Sentinel staff choose it. Depending on the entries, we might publish some or all of them.
So get creative, put on that Monty Python hat, and start drawing folks. The deadline is September 30, 2018. Send them to sdc.sentinel.@gmail.com or bring a hard copy to the Sentinel’s office. So far, Arthur is the only entrant and we do NOT want to give that $100 certificate to Arthur as he already has a lot of money. So please don’t let Arthur win.