An Open Letter to the NCUA: Please Design a New Logo

To whom it may concern at the NCUA:

It has become blatantly clear to the designers at L9 that your insurance logo is not suitable for its required use. Let me explain... As the design director at L9, a web development and design CUSO, I see your blue insurance logo a lot. It's not the aesthetics that don't work. In fact that NCUA blue is pretty snazzy. The real problem is that unless we place an extremely huge (I mean just gigantic) version of your logo on our client's website pages, it's not legible. Now that would not really be a big concern, except for the fact that it is one of your compliance requirements for it to be readable. This often scares CU's into blatantly destroying the presentation of their web pages by including an oversized blue blob on their sites.

As your website states...

"Generally, NCUA regulation Part 740 states each insured credit union must display the official sign where insured account funds or deposits are normally received including on its Internet page where it accepts deposits or opens account. Insured credit unions may vary the font sizes from that depicted on the official sign but requires the text be readable."

Although I understand the importance of the message on your logo, I feel that this is a very unreasonable guideline given the current design of the insurance logo.

Here is your logo at a reasonable size to be placed on a credit union website:

This would be a reasonable size to be placed in a footer or sub-column on any web page and not become the primary focal point of the presentation. Of course, I doubt anyone without x-ray vision could read the two lines of text at the top, or the one line at the bottom.

Here is your logo at a size that allows the "fine print" to actually be legible:

I'm sorry, that's just way too big to put on any decent web page presentation. This logo is reduced about as much as I'd recommend if we'd like it to remain readable, and its still almost 400 pixels wide. This size is just not reasonable to require credit unions to place on anything that could potentially be only twice that wide altogether.

What's the solution?
The challenging aspect of designing as suitable logo will be figuring out a way to make the long statement about how much insurance coverage you offer legible, while still not taking up much space. Don't worry, there's hope. Because a lot of our clients think its absurd for them to have to present this logo at a legible size on their web sites, they often ask if we can make modifications to achieve the compromise that I am suggesting to you in this letter.  As a result, we've come up with some good solutions, so take a look around the web at some credit union sites, and you'll probably get some inspiration. Here's an example...

 

My assumption is that the current logo was originally designed to be displayed in credit union branches - stuck to a branch window or hung near the teller window, and it would be a great design for that. The problem is that now its used in many other ways. That's why I think the real solution is for your organization to design a web version of the insurance logo. That way, you wouldn't have to require all the CU's to change every occurrence of the fancy blue block that exists in their physical locations. They could just implement a new graphic (distributed by you in electronic format) on their websites - a very simple and eco-friendly solution.

We at L9 hope that you will consider this a top priority, not only for the sake of legibility, but for the sake of our customers' brand presentations online. Let's face it, you are just screwing up their site designs by asking them to show a legible version of the current logo.

thank you,

Jason Powell
Design Director, L9