Philadelphia Logo Woes

The newly chosen (by a committee of 65) logo for the City of Philadelphia is stirring up a few bad reviews. Fast Company calls it a "Design Crime" and goes on to cleverly describe the crime scene.

Brand New commented in their post titled Phail-adelphia, "Nothing hits harder than a boring logo of your own beloved city, failing in both concept and execution."

My first observation is that a committee of 65 will never agree on anything that isn't plain vanilla. Just try to order pizza for 65 people some time. You're going to end up with cheese pizza -- no pineapple, no anchovies, no excitement.

This logo is the same. Everything about it screams ordinary and unimaginative. The execution of the art is amateurish and unsophisticated. And nothing about it could be considered branding. Brand Now rightly pointed out some odd things about the bell. One is that it's canted, perhaps to make it more "fun." But the illustration is not correct for a tilted bell (the clapper should be hanging down).

And what about the positioning. Okay, we all know the Liberty Bell -- yup, got it. But "Life, Liberty and You" doesn't exactly inspire patriotism or a sense of the city's history -- and where is some indication of the vibrant city Philadelphia is today?

Olympic Logo 2014 - Did they make the right choice?

There's a discussion going on over at Before & After magazine about the recent choice of a logo for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. (http://www.mcwade.com/DesignTalk/)

It's an interesting discussion about what goes into creating a logo that will be viewed worldwide and must communicate to a global audience.

The Before & After article compares the winning logo by Interbrand with another contender by Transformer Studio and asks for designers' opinions.

Just as Before & After did, I'll show the losing design first. Pretty and engaging. If you read the B&A article, you'll learn about some of the design objectives and how they were met through this image.

Now for the winner. It's very interesting. B&A's John McWade cautions his readers to think for a few moments before commenting or deciding which is the better choice.


I found myself immediately drawn to the first design. It's fresh looking, colorful and has a free and easy swing to it.

But the more I looked at the two logos (and the article has images of the logos in use), the more I began to feel that the IOC made the right choice with the second image. And I realized I was doing something I often caution clients about: getting stuck on the pretty choice.

The prettiest picture isn't always the best logo/brand. And for many reasons.

In this case, the second brand is very modern and may appeal more to the target audience. It works great small, large and in multiple media, including mobile (this ties in with the target market also). It has a global appeal and communicates in any language. It's also very strong and presents a great modern image for Russia.

The second logo also incorporated some other visual elements in the brand (see the article for more) and may be more appealing to youth -- “a 21st-century brand for a digital generation,” designed to “actively encourage dialog between Russians, nations and winter sports fans, particularly youth.” (Sochi2014.ru)

After a while, when I looked back at the first image, it started to seem dated and one dimensional. Very pretty, yes. And I still really like it as an image. But modern, no. So this time at least, I think the Olympic Committee made the right choice.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. What do you think?