La Jolla Museum Wants Another New Name : * Art: San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art will become the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

What’s in a name?

Plenty, if you ask officials at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, who are paying tens of thousands of dollars to an internationally known graphic-design firm to develop a new logo for another name change, the second in two years at the La Jolla institution.

Amid budget cutbacks, staff reductions and a fund-raising effort slowed by the recession, the museum has nevertheless moved ahead with plans to unveil in April its expensive new image under a slightly altered moniker--Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Officials hope the change will end its confusion with the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park and spur greater interest in the expansion-minded museum, which is tentatively scheduled to open an annex in downtown San Diego’s America Plaza in October.

“We’re really referring to it as a modification,” said museum spokeswoman Diane Maxwell. “It’s really not a name change. It’s a modified configuration.”

But with the anticipated opening of the downtown annex and plans to shut down the Prospect Street site for major renovations early next year, operators seem to believe it’s time to revamp the image of the 50-year-old institution that until a year and a half ago had gained international respect under the name the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

Museum officials declined to comment on the months-long effort to spice up its image, but sources close to the make-over estimate it will cost the museum between $30,000 and $40,000 for the as-yet-unreleased logo, which will emphasize the letters MCA in a contemporary graphics style.

The museum has contracted with Pentagram--one of the world’s biggest design firms with offices in San Francisco, New York and London--to come up with what is known in the industry as an “identification plan.”

“It’s not unusual,” said Kit Hinrichs, the Pentagram partner in charge of the museum’s image redo. “It’s done by corporations, institutions, governments--everyone who’s involved in trying to focus their attention on various audiences and presenting who they think they are to that audience.”