We are the Grand Canyon Trust, and this is our new face.
In celebration of our 30th anniversary, we’ve updated our website and logo! We invite you to look around, learn about our latest projects, and join us as we begin the next 30 years of conservation work on the Colorado Plateau.
Born around a campfire at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, from the start the Grand Canyon Trust has been dedicated to protecting the spectacular vistas, wild places, and fragile ecosystems that are the Grand Canyon. Our old logo drew inspiration from Clarence Dutton’s classic canyon sketches, and the airbrushed band of mesas left no question as to where we focused our work.
Today, our work extends north, south, west, and east of park boundaries, spanning the entire Colorado Plateau. From fighting oil shale and tar sands to reforming grazing practices in Utah forests, we advocate for over 130,000 square miles, 15 Native American tribes, and the highest density of national parks and monuments in the country. We will always carry the legacy of the Grand Canyon in our name, and our new logo captures the complete scope of our work.
Joan Carstensen, the Trust’s graphic designer of almost 20 years, logged over 100 hours of design time and cycled through at least six versions before finalizing the new logo.
According to Carstensen, the most challenging part of the design process was representing the Colorado Plateau as a whole, without entirely departing from the iconic landscape of the Grand Canyon. The little pocket of sky in the upper left corner, she says, achieves a perspective shift.
“If you were down in the canyon, you would see rock,” says Carstensen. “Adding sky to the background of the logo suggests a bird’s eye view of not just the canyon, but the entire plateau.”
With our new logo as our emblem, we hope you’ll join us as we move forward to confront the Plateau’s greatest conservation challenges of the next 30 years, from threats to Grand Canyon to climate change.
The goal of the Grand Canyon Trust logo re-design was to bring the logo up-to-date after more than 20 years of use, and to put it in a format that supports current digital technology and web and social media formats.
We wanted to capture the essence of the Grand Canyon and Colorado Plateau by distilling down and visually simplifying the essential elements of the landscape: canyons, mesas, and rivers. But, we also didn’t want a complete departure from our existing logo representing the Grand Canyon.
We accomplished this by taking a bird’s eye view of the landscape that represents various layers of the plateau. This view also suggests what is not seen—plants, animals, and people—without complicating the design by trying to add too many elements.
The shape of the mark is a circle—the universal symbol of Mother Earth, cycles, unity, wholeness, and infinity.
The color palette is derived from the rich Plateau colors of reds, purples, and golds representing landscape and light. The choice of colors and illustrative rendering style are dynamic and bold, giving the logo strength and stability.
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