The private security business has made Blackwater USA virtually a household name, and being tough is part of the game. Not just for its rifle-carrying contractors but also for its corporate logo. But now Blackwater has a new, less threatening logo. The well-armed men remain, but the company’s roughneck logo, a bear’s paw print in red crosshairs, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam — has undergone a corporate scrubbing. The company said the decision to update its logo was made long before Sept. 16, the day a Blackwater team guarding a State Department convoy in Baghdad killed 17 Iraqis. But the new logo did not appear on Blackwater’s Web site (www.blackwaterusa.com), until after the incident. The rifle-scope crosshairs so obvious in the old Blackwater logo have been reduced to a set of horizontal elipses that bracket the paw print, which has also changed to resemble an actual bear-paw imprint. The original Blackwater logo had thick white serif lettering draped over the crosshairs on a menacing black field. The new logo separates the image and the letters, which now appear in buttoned-down sans-serif black and slightly italicized on a white field. The overall look is far less “kick your butt” and much more “quarterly report,” some branding experts said. The new logo, which began to appear on some Blackwater material in late July, may also reflect the company’s desire to begin its second decade on a more anodyne note. “I would say they’re repositioning themselves,” says one graphic design expert. “The old logo suggests that they’re targeting people. The new logo is a more ambiguous, more safe corporate logo. A Blackwater SpokesHack said the idea to redesign the logo came in May, when a graphic designer approached Blackwater at its headquarters in Moyock, N.C. By that time, the company and its founder, Erik Prince, was already in the "cross-hairs" of Congress because of its actions in Iraq.
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Yeah... Much more peaceful!
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