BAGHDAD -- In the private security business that has made Blackwater USA virtually a household name, being tough is part of the game. Not just for its rifle-carrying contractors but also for its corporate logo.
Well, not anymore. The well-armed men remain, but the company's roughneck logo -- a bear's paw print in a red crosshairs, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam -- has undergone a corporate publicity 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 fatally shot 17 Iraqis near a bustling traffic circle. But the new logo did not appear on Blackwater's Web site ( www.blackwaterusa.com ), until after the incident, a Blackwater spokeswoman said.
The rifle-scope crosshairs so obvious in the old Blackwater logo have been reduced to a set of horizontal ellipses that bracket, but no longer enclose, the paw print, which also has changed to more closely 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 are now in buttoned-down sans-serif black and slightly italicized on a white field.
Though the red ellipses in the new logo retain the horizontal crosshairs, 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, also may speak volumes about the company's desire to begin its second decade on a more soothing note.
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"I would say it's a highly significant change; they're repositioning themselves," said Lauren Miller, the owner of MDesign, a graphic design firm in New York. "The old logo suggests that they're targeting people. The new logo is a more ambiguous, more safe corporate logo."
"The subtle changes mean everything here," Miller said, "by eliminating the scope of a sniper's rifle."
Blackwater's spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, referred to the crosshairs as a reticle, and said it remained intact in the new logo, "just modernized."
She 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, had already become a topic of discussion at a congressional committee hearing in February on the actions of private security firms in Iraq.
Tyrrell said the old logo probably was more fitting when the company was starting out as primarily a trainer of military and law enforcement personnel. "It seems to be a trend with companies," she went on, "once they achieve some recognition, to lose the words and go with just the logo." She added, "We have a little bit of recognition now."
