As Kansas City expanded, adding more counties to the north of the Missouri River, the Mayor called for the redesign of the city’s municipal seal, with the Municipal Art Commission assigning the job to the Design Department of the Kansas City Art Institute.
Taking inspiration from the city’s identity as ‘The Heart of America’ eight concepts were drawn up over a two year period and sent to Mayor. However, the Mayor, with a specific desire to see the seal feature the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, was not happy. Further ideas were sought, and the project was outsourced to an unnamed New York City design studio. These would also be rejected.
The Kansas City Art Institute spent four years conducting studies and generating proposals to find a solution. This was arrived at by design instructor John Baker who took inspiration from a sketch that had been created as part of the initial design stage four years prior but had not made it into the original presentation of eight concepts.
Baker’s concept was comprised of four interlocking hearts, constructed from two parallel lines, these symbolised the city’s identity as the heart of America and the two rivers. This, however, was met with mixed reactions amongst council members.
One council member called the design “far out” while another described it as “interlocking racetracks”. A majority of the city’s council members couldn’t see the hearts.
Councilman, G. Lawrence Blankenship showed the logo to an elevator operator at City Hall, offering him a cash prize if he identified it at a first glance. The operator couldn’t guess it. Further, a significant number of city residents interpreted the design as paperclips. Despite these concerns and confusion, the design became the official seal with a vote of 7 to 5, and would later be embraced by a growing number of locals in Kansas City.
The municipal seal, which was nicknamed ‘Paperclip City’, was used until 1992, replaced following a council motion by a new symbol that also used concentric lines to form a heart.
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The most recognisable mark Milan ever produced was not designed by anybody, and it is a bread roll. The michetta descends from the Austrian Kaisersemmel and was reshaped here to be hollow inside, because in the damp air of the Po valley a dense crumb went rubbery within hours. The form is not an aesthetic decision, it is the solution to a climate problem, and the result is a product engineered not to last more than a day. Nobody signed it, nobody voted on it, and everybody in the city recognises it instantly. And your Kansas City story has an exact Milanese echo: outside this city the same shape is called a rosetta and is not the same bread, and almost nobody notices the difference. A mark that gets read wrong for decades and adopted anyway, until the misreading becomes the name. Paperclip City is what happens when a population takes ownership of something it was never consulted about, which is the only real test a piece of civic design ever passes. Seven votes to five, four years of work, and the thing that made it stick was a nickname invented by people who could not tell what it was.