After proposing a new design for its municipal logo on Facebook, one tiny Maine town faced backlash in the comments section when it admitted the mark was generated by AI. The post and page are now private.
Newburgh, Maine, population 1,520, is some 25 miles from the coast, just outside Bangor. In its Facebook post late last month, the town didn’t hide the fact that its proposed farm-theme logo was AI-generated, and even asked for feedback.
“It’s time to update our town logo that we use on our letterhead,” the post read, according to Bangor Daily News. “This is what AI and I came up with as I am no artist. Also, attached is what our old logo looked like. We wanted to know thoughts on the new design and if it represents Newburgh.”
The logo shows a farmhouse with a silo inside of a round seal with hills in the background. In the foreground, there are rows of crops and a pine tree, a longtime Maine symbol. The AI authorship of the logo is obvious in text written along the bottom, where the two number 1s in “1819” are upside down and the letter I in “Incorporated” is a number 1.
Residents from the small town were not happy. David Aston, who lives in Newburgh and owns the nearby Timber Hearth Tattoo Co., offered to design a logo for the town.
“I think it’s important for local governments to go human-made because it reinforces the importance of design and art as a human endeavor that’s just as important as the other functions of government,” he tells Fast Company.
The AI logo was a take on Newburgh’s current logo, an illustration of a farmhouse that’s too detailed to look good when shrunken down. On town letterhead, the current farmhouse mark appears along with Word Art-style text in a concave shape that writes out its year of incorporation. It looks dated, and the town is well intentioned to consider a new logo.
Redesigning town or city logos is inherently fraught, though, since everyone has an opinion about graphic design, especially when it’s about where they live. When it comes to winning over the public, using AI is likely to make the process even harder.
A Pew Research Center survey released in March found nearly 40% of U.S. adults believe data centers are “mostly bad” for the environment and home energy costs.
That’s especially true in Maine, where growing backlash culminated in the first statewide ban on data centers in the U.S. The ban, passed by state lawmakers in April, lasts more than a year and covers data centers that surpass a certain size.
Representatives for Newburgh didn’t respond to a request for comment, but taking into account the small size of the town staff and government (its town manager, for example, serves as clerk, treasurer, tax collector, registrar of voters, and general assistance administrator), it’s perhaps not surprising they might turn to AI for logo ideas.
Graphic design experience is not a requirement for public service, and not every municipality has the budget or resources for design-forward government services. Still, the blowback in Newburgh is instructive.
Getting public input was smart, and what town officials found was that for many residents, an AI design doesn’t represent them. When it comes to branding the places we call home, a human touch is key.
