We need a new logo. Actually, we kind of need a logo, period — there’s not really a logo on our website, just our name in some fonts, and a totally different icon on Twitter. We need something unifying. Here’s what we’ve picked:

Many of you voted in our survey of eight options. The concept that turned into this got the best ratings, and we liked it too.

The double G reflects our name, of course, and the icon looks a little like a transit map (and uses a green close to the one for the Metro Green Line).

The tail is shaped somewhat like the District of Columbia, but it was important to us that the logo not be just something inside a DC outline, because we’re explicitly about Greater Washington, not just DC. Here, the curve of the G sweeps beyond DC. The tail also suggests the Potomac and Anacostia rivers as well as “greater than” symbols.

We picked two tones of green and gray (a greenish gray). Green reflects growth and motion, like a traffic light. It’s also the color for one line of the Metro system, one that spans a lot of different types of neighborhoods.

Finally, green is not the red of the DC flag, blue of Virginia, or gold and black of Maryland; we didn’t want to favor one such entity over another, and using all three would be too busy and look too much like some nations’ flags.

Gray is part of the site’s current aesthetic, such as the sidebars. (You could also say it evokes the built environment, though honestly, we just picked it because it looks good with the green.)

The text is a font called Whitney Condensed, a sans serif with some playful features like the ends of some of the lines (see the top left of the W, the bottom right of the A, or the top right of the T). We want to provide you with solid information, but also don’t want to be too square or stodgy about it, and this font fits that.

The tagline includes the double chevron “greater greater” which we also liked in the logo discussion. Many of you liked that symbol, but it didn’t really work on its own. Here, as a secondary element, people can get the math joke, or not. That symbol also connotes motion, and the similarity to sharrows ties in bicycling.

We hope you like it. For sure, some of you will hate it; any logo change engenders some strong opinions. But we like it.

We may try to work in the logo here and there soon. More significantly, this is one step in redesigning our website, for which this logo will be a cornerstone. Stay tuned for more on that.

Thanks very much to Peter Dovak, who created the double G shape, and Derek Hogue, who is doing our website redesign and worked with us on colors, fonts, and text.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.