We are pumped to officially announce our new logo. It may seem weird to announce the logo a few weeks after it went live on our site, but we’ve been busy scrubbing away all vestiges of the former logo from letterhead, business cards, marketing collateral, etc.

Why did we do this? A little history might be helpful. The WTIA was once known as the Washington Software Alliance (WSA) during the time of floppy disks, the advent of CD-ROMs, and this new thing called the World Wide Web. We clearly wanted to pay our respects to URL syntax…

It was still called the WSA when Internet advertising was declared dead in 2001 and Amazon was burning $1B in cash every year selling books online. In 2007 we entered the Great Recession and all non-profits floundered. In February 2008, WSA re-formed itself from a professional association into a trade association and renamed itself Washington Technology Industry Association to serve every kind of tech company. In 2009 WTIA merged with TechAmerica and started to make good on that promise.

In 2018, WTIA has evolved into a co-op of 800 member companies and our mission is way bigger than trade association. We’ve created healthcare and 401k programs for small companies. We launched the first nationally registered tech apprenticeship. We help community and tech colleges tune their curricula so their students get hired by tech companies. We’re a driver of civic collaboration by tech companies in Seattle. And we’ve helped raise millions of dollars for Computer Science education for students across the state.

That is no mere trade association. In fact, we’re now a family of five organizations to make all those programs happen. As you can imagine, it started to get really difficult trying to make dull orange, green, and blue with an abstract, electron-looking mark work with any of our core messaging. People were especially unhappy with the orange.

We needed a reboot.

We decided to reach back to our roots as WSA, re-evaluate our brand attributes, and come up with a simple, scalable logo that could embrace and extend all of our current and future programs.

Our core brand attributes include these concepts:

• Community
• Jobs
• Trust
• Growth
• Change agent
• Washington State

Our mission statement is:

We consolidate the power of member companies to solve business challenges they cannot easily solve alone. Our guiding principle is to help Washington residents gain access to tech-industry jobs.

After vetting more than 50 initial logo concepts, we settled on the one we love the most.

The bars in our new logo are a representation of small, medium, and large companies in our community. They also convey growth through iterative experiment. There is a strong collaboration between the companies and the W, representing Washington. They fit pretty well together, don’t you think?

The green is fresh; it represents growth, health, and The Evergreen State. The dark blue evokes a feeling of professionalism and loyalty. And of course — Go Hawks, Go Mariners, Go Sounders Go!

We’re proud of our new logo and we hope you like it too. 2018 is the newest chapter of WTIA and we’re looking forward to serving the community well.