Travel / Outdoors

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If you’ve been lurking around Seattle since the Early Cretaceous as some of us have, you may remember some of the incarnations of the city’s visitor-promotion agency and how it has packaged our fair city.

In 2006, Seattle’s new promotional slogan, “Metronatural,” was painted in 18-foot letters atop the Space Needle. Now, the slogan has been retired. (Associated Press file photo)

Back in 1982, the Seattle-King County Convention and Visitors Bureau officially dubbed us the Emerald City, after a public contest to come up with a new moniker. (The previous “Queen City” seemed more appropriate to London — or perhaps the more colorful neighborhoods of San Francisco.)

In the late ’90s, another promotional campaign involved a rebus representation of “See-@-L,” including a drawing of an eyeball for the “See” sound and the @ symbol suggestive of the Internet (appropriate for our Microsoftie metropolis).

Then in 2006 we became the Metronatural city — a misguided slogan developed at a cost of $200,000 that seemed like a spinoff of the teeth-curling “metrosexual” label that helped lose the 2004 presidential election for now-Secretary of State John Kerry.

Our Metronatural era went hand-in-Gucci-glove with the much-hated, ill-fated Washington state tourism slogan “Say WA.” (Remember that?) Like “Say WA” — which evoked images of an unpleasant dental procedure — “Metronatural” never really caught fire. Backers hoped it would paint a picture of a city where hip young tech-startup founders hop out of their sea kayaks and catch a streetcar to the symphony.  Detractors said it made us sound like one big urban nudist camp.

In the meantime, the city’s promotional agency was calling itself a more-streamlined “Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau” (dropping the King County reference).

Now, even more streamlining: Both the bureau’s name and its slogan have been boiled down to “Visit Seattle.” (Its URL, too: visitseattle.org.) Their new logo slopes the tops of the t’s and the “L” in Seattle to evoke the Space Needle and a mountain slope. Kinda.

I’ll say one thing. It’s concise.

And after “Metronatural” and “Say WA,” maybe simple is smart.