Skip to main content

South Valley Riverton Journal

It’s a winner: a new logo for Riverton City

May 07, 2018 01:18PM ● By Mariden Williams

The Riverton City Council presented winning designer Trevor Garner with a $200 check. (Riverton City Communications)

By Mariden Williams | [email protected]

Back in March, Riverton city officials hosted a public contest to design a new city logo, and on April 3, they unveiled the winning design.

The new logo, created by local graphic designer Trevor Garner, features a stylized gray line drawing of the city’s own iconic Old Dome Meeting Hall and a tidy blue-and-gray color scheme. The city council presented Garner with a giant $200 check as a reward for creating the winning design and thanked everybody who participated in the contest.

Riverton’s old logo (top), compared with the new (bottom), designed by Riverton resident Trevor Garner (Riverton City Communications)

"We had 53 submissions, and quite a range of different concepts, so I'm thankful for how much participation we got," said Mayor Trent Staggs. 

The city hosted the logo design contest amid concerns that the old logo, which has served the city for about 20 years, was hard to differentiate from other Utah city logos and was too detailed and cluttered to read well from a distance or at smaller sizes.

"It was a little busy; it was very hard to distinguish," Staggs said. "In an effort to bring about a really distinguishable or identifiable logo and brand for the city, we actually put it out to the community at large."

Submissions were open for two weeks, from March 1 to March 14. Upon closing submissions, city leaders went through a multi-stage review process to whittle down the pool to the best candidates.

"The elected officials kind of weighed in on their favorite designs; staff did the same, and when we had it winnowed down from those 53 to the top 10 or 12, we put that out to the public, and had almost 500–600 people that weighed in and voted," Staggs said.

In sharp contrast to the old logo, where the city's name is somewhat lost in a distractingly detailed vignette of idyllic Utah countryside scenery, the new design puts the city's name front and center, with "RIVERTON" proudly proclaimed in a bold, legible font, complete with a little river running through the O. No mountains, no little pioneer carts, no visual clutter.

"This is very clean; it's distinct; it's Riverton, Utah,” said Councilmember Brent Johnson in a work session preceding the official logo unveiling. “There's no doubt where it is. And it just sets us apart from all the other cities that have mountains in their logo. Eagle Mountain, Draper, Herriman, Sandy, Cottonwood Heights, Ogden—I mean, they all have mountains in their logo. What sets Riverton apart? Right now, it's the Dome, and that has so much history behind it, from the days when the Old Dome Church was here. The nostalgia of that is brought back."

While the Old Dome Meeting Hall is not actually all that old, having been built in 2015, it was modeled on Riverton's historic Old Dome Church, which was built in the early 1900s.

"The church took the community nearly 10 years to build, an effort that is a prime example of the citizen involvement, unity and work ethic that are still found in Riverton residents today," Communications Director Casey Saxton said in an official video.

"I wasn't really originally a fan of the Dome and having that be such a symbol for the city," Staggs said. "But after having seen the over 53 submissions, with the vast majority having that element incorporated in the logo, and then putting it out to the citizens and seeing how many of them voted for one of those types of concepts, it really made me think again. That dome has become a real symbol of the community and of the preservation of Riverton history."

"It symbolizes that community feel that we're really searching for. And not just community and preservation of history, but also the innovation and the ability to move forward is really apparent in the design, the font and the color selection."