Galway Today
When Does a Logo Stop Belonging to Its Designer and Start Belonging to a City?
Galway City — 17 September 2026
Galway City's familiar G
Galway City's new visual identity
Galway has a new look.
Galway City Council has unveiled a new visual identity built around a lower-case g, replacing the familiar capital G that has been part of the city's visual landscape for decades.
And I have a problem with it.
That surprises me, because I am usually all for change.
Cities should change. Buildings change. Streets change. Art changes. The way we communicate changes. Galway itself has never stood still.
But sometimes modernisation isn't resisted because people dislike change.
Sometimes the thing being replaced has already acquired cultural value.
The familiar Galway G can trace its beginnings back to 1984, when its first iteration was created by Galway designer Jimmy Conneelly as part of the city's quincentenary celebrations.
That means generations of people have grown up seeing it.
It has appeared on Council vehicles, signs, buildings, bins, documents and countless other pieces of the everyday Galway landscape.
After more than forty years, something interesting happens to a design like that.
You stop noticing that somebody designed it.
It simply becomes part of the place.
And that raises a question: When does a logo stop belonging to its designer and start belonging to a city?
The new design hasn't appeared without thought behind it.
Galway City Council says the lower-case g takes inspiration from the hull of the ship represented in Galway's coat of arms, while its form also draws from seanchló, the historic style of Irish script.
The familiar maroon remains. Blue has been introduced to represent the River Corrib. The Irish-language name, Comhairle Cathrach na Gaillimhe, is given greater prominence, and the city's coat of arms has not been abolished; it remains part of the Council's wider visual identity.
There are ideas there that I can appreciate.
But appreciating the thinking behind a new design and feeling that it should replace an old one are two different things.
Perhaps that is what makes this change particularly interesting.
The old G has had something the new g cannot possibly have on its first day:
Time.
Time to become familiar.
Time to appear in people's photographs without being the subject of the photograph.
Time to sit quietly on the streets of Galway until nobody really thinks of it as branding anymore.
That cannot be manufactured by a design brief.
It can only happen by living with a symbol.
The Council says the change is about more than a logo. Its €28,000 branding project followed a review of how the organisation presents the many services it provides, with the intention of creating a more consistent and recognisable identity.
That is a legitimate conversation for a city to have.
But perhaps another conversation should happen alongside it.
Not simply:
Is the new logo good or bad?
But:
What exactly are we replacing?
Because if Galway's old G were merely an outdated piece of corporate branding, changing it would be relatively straightforward.
If, however, forty-two years of Galway life have transformed it into something people recognise as part of the city itself, then changing it becomes something more complicated.
The new g may eventually acquire its own history.
People may grow accustomed to it. Children growing up in Galway today may one day recognise it as instinctively as previous generations recognise the old G.
That possibility should be allowed too.
But today, on the day the new identity is officially unveiled, the old G has something its replacement has yet to earn.
Galway has already lived with it.
And perhaps that is why changing a city's identity can never be quite the same thing as changing a company's logo.
A company can own its branding.
A city eventually shares its symbols with the people who live among them.
Bam Artiste
