From WTF to TFW – How a Blog Caused a Logo Change for Wisconsin

Earlier this year, one of my favorite blogs, Your Logo Makes Me Barf, wrote a post called WTF Wisconsin? that pointed out a glaring error made by the Wisconsin Tourism Federation.  If you don’t know what the acronym WTF stands for, I’ll tell you — “What the fu*k?”  Take a look at the logo below.

While it’s surprising that no one within or working with the Wisconsin Tourism Federation mentioned this problem to them, the more interesting point of the story comes from how they learned about it.  The power of the blogosphere is demonstrated once again with the WTF Wisconsin? post on Your Logo Makes Me Barf.  The Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel wrote about it on the same day in their Hubbub blog.

Perhaps the more unfortunate part of this story though is something mentioned on another of my favorite blogs — Brand New.  The organization took the time and invested the money to change their name after realizing the error (the new name is Tourism Federation of Wisconsin), but they just flipped the letters in the logo instead of creating a new one.  Now that’s a missed opportunity as this logo leaves a lot to be desired (see below).

Of course, the lesson to learn is — always make sure multiple people review your work.  You never know what you might miss.