I was organizing my fishing pics from this past season into folders and stumbled upon this logo I created a few years ago and it reminded me of this thread.
I have no design background and don't have Photoshop. What I have is Gimp, a free program that's similar. I know more than the basics, but when my bro in law wanted a trophy for the fishing tournament we have every year, he wanted a logo so he commissioned me to do it. Not gonna lie, it took like 2 hours to do this and I had to take a tutorial on layering to get this right.
So if someone like me, who is far from a professional, can make this logo, which I think is pretty decent, why can't so many cities come up with something better?
Of course, I pulled a couple of stock animated images, so that made it easier, but even if a city couldn't afford to hire a design firm and pay like 50 grand for a few hours work, could they not have gotten the design dept. from the local or nearby college to come up with something for a fraction of the price? Or have a design competition for locals only? I just watched a video about how Mississippi had a contest for the new flag and they settled on one non-pro's design as the core of the new flag and added a couple elements from others.
I know many of these towns and cities had their logos done decades ago but some were not so long ago and are pretty bad. You get the feeling they just had someone from the city staff sketch something on paper and said okay cool, that's our new logo.
Perhaps Otacular can offer some insight.