"$46K to design a state logo I could've made on MS Paint by accident." [View all]

That was the twitter comment ADweek quoted in its headline-
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/tennessee-wanted-consistency-elicited-mockery-its-new-logo-164941

Nine months for a marketing outfit to come up with this-


This by the way is simply to replace the states "Tristar" logo, which in my opinion, does not need replacing, especially when more important things like teacher pay in the state is being cut.

One Knoxville writer points out-
TN never existed as an abbreviation for Tennessee until 1963.

Most Tennesseans who ever lived­—W.C. Handy, Patsy Cline, James Agee, Bob Neyland—never saw the letters “TN” and understood them to mean “Tennessee.” But it was in 1963 that the U.S. Postal Service imposed its ZIP code system, and with it a standardized two-letter code for every state. The idea was not just that two letters might be easier for overworked employees to type in, but that a standardized two-letter state code would leave room for the new five-digit codes. That number’s what the postal employees and their machinery really paid attention to, and you don’t want a long state name crowding it off. In a way, it was a deliberate diminution of the importance of states in the postal scheme of things. The ZIP code is supreme.


To the post office, in 1963, the N is there for one reason: because the other T state, Texas, doesn’t have an N in it. The implication is that without the N, folks might get Tennessee mixed up with Texas. It’s the way robots think.

So the N means, in rough translation, “Not Texas.”

TN has no official meaning except at the post office, and even there, it’s meant to be paired with a ZIP code. If the red is indeed a political statement, the TN suggests an irony. It was the imposition of a federal taxpayer-dependent bureaucracy.

http://www.knoxmercury.com/2015/05/27/the-problem-with-tn/

A change.org petition has been organized-
https://www.change.org/p/tennessee-governor-save-the-tristar

More mockery can be found in a story by WSMV in Nashville-
http://www.wsmv.com/story/29128677/new-state-logo-prompts-online-outrage-humor