One of the most frequent questions we are asked is: “Why doesn’t your site name have anything to do with St. Louis?” to which we always reply “It doesn’t need to. If the site does well, the name won’t matter and it will just seem St. Louis-y regardless. Having to put “STL” or “river” in every damn thing created around here is lame and lazy.
That question is actually #2 to one other question though: “Why don’t you have the Arch on your site anywhere?” which is interesting really since that’s the exact opposite question we have for nearly every business or organization in St. Louis: Why the hell do you think you need to put the Arch in all your logos?! Yes, we get it that the Arch is St. Louis’ nationally recognized symbol, and because of that, it makes sense for tourism logo’s to include the arch visual…it still makes no sense as to why anything else has the arch in it. Quite simply, the Arch doesn’t really mean a lot to actual St. Louisans. How many of you have actually been up in the Arch? We bet fewer than you might think. Flat out, the Arch is not something the average St. Louisan thinks about at all. Hell, only a small fraction of the St. Louis area can even see the arch and a regular basis and even city dwellers don’t give a crap.
As is now the norm for any societal obsession, there is now a Tumblr blog for it, illustrating our madness: “Logos Featuring the St. Louis Arch” is exactly how it sounds: A huge list of all the different logos that look pretty much identical because they all use the arch as their defining feature.
None of which are even the least bit clever. Just once would we like to see a veterinarian use the arch as a looping stream of piss coming from behind a dog’s stretched leg, or even a…um…ok, the dog peeing thing is really the only decent idea.
We can assure all you out-of-town graphic designers that few here in town think of the Arch as a symbol for westward expansion anymore as you might assume. To us, it’s become like a giant Star Gate that opened a portal to the ugly and violent land of Illinois. We’d close the gate, but now we need them for strip clubs.