Hollywood Burbank Airport selects a new logo
Hollywood Burbank Airport’s recently adopted brand name will now have a new logo to go along with it.
After about two months of introducing and tweaking the designs, the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority voted 5-2 on Tuesday to adopt one of three logos presented that will be used to market the airfield, particularly to travelers east of the Colorado Rockies.
Pasadena Commissioner Steve Madison and Glendale Commissioner Zareh Sinanyan were absent.
Burbank Commissioner Don Brown said the operations and development committee opted not to recommend a specific logo to the full authority board because of the wide variety of opinions that other commissioners and staff had regarding the eight potential logos presented during the past two months.
The approved logo, which depicts an image of a 727 aircraft created by two-tone chevrons, was one of the original logos introduced to the committee by the South Pasadena branding firm Anyone Collective in June.
“For me, this is all about clarity,” Pasadena Commissioner Terry Tornek said. “We went through the renaming of the airport because, unhappily, Bob Hope didn’t mean anything to anybody in terms of the market we’re trying to achieve.”
Tornek added that the logo takes out any second-guessing about what travelers and residents think the airport is trying to convey to them, and that the image they voted on clearly tells people that they are at an airport.
Glendale Commissioner Laura Friedman, who voted against adopting what Anyone Collective labeled as the traditional option, said the approved logo was too safe and could be attached to any airport in the country.
Friedman favored Anyone Collective’s preferred choice, which was a contemporary image of two F-117 stealth bombers — the last aircraft made by Lockheed at the airfield — overlapping one another to depict an abstract H.
Friedman told her colleagues that the logo would almost always be accompanied by the name of the airport and would not confuse travelers about the identity of the airfield.
“What seems abstract now will seem less and less abstract as you use it in the branding,” she said. “As people start to see it more in conjunction with the airport, they will see an H. I don’t know if we need to be so literal about this brand… Any context that this is used in is going to be in conjunction with something that’s about the airport. It’s not going to be out there on its own.”
Friedman, a Glendale councilwoman, added that the approved traditional logo looked too much like Chevron Corp.’s logo, and she said she was concerned that people would confuse the two images.
Glendale Commissioner Frank Quintero, who also dissented on the vote, said he preferred the retro logo presented, which was inspired by the airfield’s 1930s logo when the airport was called United Airport. However, the other commissioners said that design too closely resembled the logo used by New Balance.
Michael Fiore and Stephen Chavez, co-founders of Anyone Collective, said their team will now conduct a full trademark search to ensure that the logo is not being used by any other agency or company.
When that is completed, the branding firm will create different color palettes and typography styles the airport can use as it tries to attract more travelers to its terminals.
“Now that they have selected a logo, we can move forward into the next phase,” Fiore said.
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Anthony Clark Carpio, anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com
Twitter: @acocarpio
