The Underscore Archives

Chris,

I don't necessarily disagree with you on any of that, but I am aware  
of the fact that many _really good_ logos are serendipitous, and many  
really expensive and highly rationalised and tested rebranding  
exercises suck so much balls. (eg. "Royal Mail" => "Consignia")

I bet most of that £400k was spent in the focus groups, meetings,  
writing of usage standards and other documents, and very little  
either at a flipchart coming up with ideas, or at a sketchpad or  
screen implementing them.

Such a competition would be for the latter, still keeping a good  
stack of cash for the consultants to take the idea for the logo and  
turn it into a working brand.  The rewards for winning would  
undoubtedly be beyond nominal compensation, and I think you'd find  
many good designers who'd be up for it.  After all, "Designer of an  
award-winning global Olympic brand used on billions of dollars of  
merchandise and publicity materials" looks pretty good on a CV.

This new logo is obviously a committee job, with the decision makers  
being blinded by silly words like "edgy" and "daring" to make up for  
their lack of experience in choosing this kind of thing.  They then  
spent ages coming up with stupid platitudes about youth culture,  
aspirations and inclusiveness.


Regardless, I just have a thing about these kinds of closed-door  
hijinks for _public projects_.  Yeah, it's fairly dumb for a company  
to do such a competition for their branding, but things like the  
Olympics, the Dome, and so forth should have some level of public  
participation.  *Especially* when the results are so chronically bad.

Meh, anyway, the competition would probably be a mess.  Still, I  
would have liked to have seen a public vote (on Saturday night BBC1,  
no less) for the nation's choice of a logo from a good range of  
alternatives.

Saying that, the British public seem to suck at choosing a Eurovision  
song, and would probably make just as an embarrassing choice with a  
logo...


Tom

-- 
Tom Gidden
http://gidden.net/tom/