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Palm Desert council weighs codifying city logo use; some members resist redesigning the official seal
Summary
Public affairs staff asked Council whether to codify municipal logo use and pursue a new seal redesign; staff said prior 2023 and 2025 efforts produced no concepts forwarded to Council, and members voiced both support for keeping the historic seal and calls to update it to be more inclusive.
Thomas Soul, Public Affairs Manager, told the Palm Desert City Council on March 26 that staff are proposing municipal-code language to codify use of the city logo and asked whether Council wanted to proceed with a renewed effort to redesign the official city seal.
Soul said the city seal is the codified official symbol used on oaths of office, proclamations and certified documents, while the logo was developed more than a decade ago for tourism marketing and has been used increasingly in non-official contexts. "We don't have any such protection for the city logo, and so we decided that as we're using it more and more, as it's becoming more visible, that it was time to codify this in the municipal code and get some language in there about how it can be used," Soul said.
Soul reviewed past attempts to update the seal: a 2023 designer engagement that yielded no agreed designs and a 2025 student contest and advisory group that produced submissions but no concepts were forwarded to Council. Soul proposed a possible RFQ process to select finalists and present designs for a public vote but requested Council direction on whether to proceed.
Council members voiced differing views. One member said they preferred keeping the existing seal and formalizing its use in code (Option A). Another member said the seal feels "outdated" and urged an update to better reflect Palm Desert's diversity and civic identity rather than what the speaker called recreational clip-art imagery.
No formal vote was taken. Council members asked staff to codify logo usage in the municipal code; there was no consensus to adopt a redesign process at this meeting.
