in Our Opinion … Mayor calls for a change in city seal/logo design

Mayor Adam Alharbi has been moving fast to establish his identity, and how he views the office of mayor, and the city.
He wasted no time in announcing a wish to update the city’s seal/logo that, currently, reflects the Hamtramck of a certain time. The decades-old logo depicts the role of factories and manufacturing that helped define this city in the first half of the 20th century.
He’s not the first to suggest it’s time to come up with a new logo design that reflects the Hamtramck of today.
But he has been faulted for springing this on residents without any prior public call for logo designs. The reaction to the logos he did present was a resounding “no.”
We’ll cut the mayor some slack on how he went about unveiling this logo campaign, but let it be a lesson that the public should be made aware of issues like this potential redesign instead of having it sprung on them.
There was much criticism that the proposed logo designs looked AI generated, and we agree. They certainly don’t reflect anything special unique about contemporary Hamtramck, and have left many with the feeling that the designs were impersonal.
The mayor wisely read the room, so to speak, and has brought in the city’s Arts & Culture Commission to take over the project.
But we are still open-minded to the idea of adopting a new logo design, but we also have to admit we’re still in favor of leaving the logo just as it is, in a nod to our historical past.
We have new folks in office now, and we owe it to them to hear them out and be open-minded to making changes.
Posted Feb. 6, 2026