Kevin Blake's Blog

The big news of the day is the unveiling of the London 2012 logo. There’s no denying the 12,149 signatures on the “Change The London 2012 Logo” petition. The logo had quite clearly made its mark on the population. And why not? We’ll be seeing this logo and branding that it implies for the next 5 years at least.

I don’t like to tackle the contentious minefield that is design and branding. It’s better left to people who give a damn in my opinion, which perhaps isn’t the most healthy stance for a web-site developer. But… I can make random analogies for anything, and they easily spiral out of control…

A brand is a lot like an iceberg, see. You can only give it a gentle shove in the general direction you want to go in. Standing on the shore you can shout encouragement or wave it off – but you’re still on the shore. It’s out there and sometimes there’s not a lot you can do except for frantic splashing in the waves. The best brands will evolve, picking up more icebergs along the way until one of two things happens.

1. It’s a huge success, travels for thousands of miles, but they eventually reach warmer climates, melt, and disappear. In which case you’re going to need another block of ice.
2. Your brand gets in the way of another body at sea. It causes unimaginable damage to everything around it as well as itself. It’s time to walk back down the beach and pretend you were nowhere near it when it drifted free.

So to get back to the point. Which of these is the London 2012 logo? Well it’s different, which some might call brave, or stupid. It’s brightly coloured and stands out, which is meant to appeal to the young people of now and 2012. Actually, let’s not circle this point any longer. It’s ridiculously stupid, is what it is. It lacks the finesse of London 2012 candidate city logo and absolutely deserves the ‘Lisa Simpson giving head’ description circulating all around the country at the moment.

And therein lies the genius. No publicity is bad publicity and everyone is talking about it. I don’t feel it represents the England of today, or tomorrow for that matter. But it is simple and already stands out as London 2012 Olympics. Wherever the London 2012 committee want to take this branding or whatever it was supposed to mean at conception – it’s released and it’s out at sea. Maybe we can all help it along in the right direction.