As the old saying goes, if you can’t do something right, do it anyway! Saint Francois County, Missouri, with a population of 65,359 (as of the 2010 census), has made national news as it debuted in a new iteration of their county seal. The design appears to have been compiled in a 1995 version of Microsoft Paint, the handiwork of Saint François County Commissioner Harold Gallagher.
“I understand there is a fever on social media around the county seal,” Gallagher said at the committee’s January meeting, quoted online by the Daily Journal. “It was a rush deal when I had two days for the audience to come up with a stamp and my determination was proof positive that I’m not artistically inclined.”
But I ask you, could a non-artist have skillfully manipulated the current seal symbols: a american flag, bald eagle in flight, pick and axe, likely shape of county, and A book with a giant cross appeared from it? It takes a special kind of vision to take something really bad and make it definitely worse. Much worse, if one had to put this down exactly Seal in a satirical TV show like, Saturday Night Live or Gardens and recommendationIt would be very silly to blame.
The poor design lies mostly in the photo-realistic elements of poorly resolved clip-art style, which Gallagher expanded from the 1982 edition of the stamp, creating a host of synthetic slips – but the stamp on the stamp is the bright red streak encircling this jumble of Pictures. As one Reddit commenter noted, it’s a missed opportunity for Comic Sans. Apparently, the county seal’s redesign has been a Gallaher’s pet project for years, as it was photographed alongside two copies of previous iterations of the seal during the “State of the County” headline on February 19, 2018. I think we found the one disaster that can’t be attributed to the impact of COVID-19, but only to the reluctance of ordinary people to actually hire artists to do the things that artists are good at.
Gallagher and the committee still resist the idea of using taxpayer money to make the bad thing less bad, and are setting the standards for open competition to redesign the seal. And don’t worry, despite the lack of technical skills, Gallaher still had plenty of ideas for a redesign.
“I would like to add an element to the seal,” he said at the meeting. “We are parkland and I would like the seal to include some symbols around the parks.” This is a great idea, because what this seal definitely needs is more. “I would like it to be better than the seal we have now, which would be a fatal blow,” he said. It’s hard to imagine an outcome that could actually be worse, but if it were possible, we’d expect the proud County of Show Me to show us the way.
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