Stronger Together, Not

St. Stephen's is one of my many favored local nonprofit organizations, well known to most people in the core of the Twin Cities for their good services to homeless folks and the fact that they work on the continuum from the obvious to the less obvious. 

They recently announced that they will be merging with another basic services organization I don't know, named House of Charity. Right off, I'm not a fan of that name, but I'm willing to withhold judgment because sometimes names exist for historical purposes and organizations rise above them. 

But I have to say that this recent merger announcement graphic does not give me faith:

I sincerely hope that bunch of stuff in the center, where the arrows are pointing, is not supposed to be a logo for the new merged organization. 

Neither of the original organizations had a great logo (though of the two, I guess I prefer the House of Hope logo, since the St. Stephen's logo has always made me wonder what it meant).

But this new thing is just... what?

First of all, the type: ugly and incompetent. It's the same cheap Century Gothic as the House of Charity logo, so that's not great to start, but it's set really unevenly and too tightly, and with fake small capital letters, so the S and T are heavier than the other letters. 

Second, those images. I guess they represent food, housing, and... brains? Cauliflower? Thought bubbles? What? But the clip art styles is in three completely different styles, so there's no unity among them—not that they make any sense together in the first place, so it was probably asking too much for graphic unity to bring them together. 

It's a funny juxtaposition, now that I think of it: "stronger together," but with nothing in common visually.

I hope it's just a temporary graphic while they're working on the real name and logo.