Londoners to Tweet ideas for a logo to promote the capital
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You may remember a post I wrote last year about London not being sexy compared to New York…. well it looks like the Mayor of London has finally decided to finally commission a sexy logo for our awesome city – better late than never!
Boris Johnson will be spending £600,000 on the logo to be used globally in the run up to the 2012 Olympic Games and a shortlist of six design firms will be drawn from more than 450 entries after tomorrow’s deadline.
One of the firms in the running, Moving Brands, are using Twitter to invite the public to take part in the creative process, much to the dissatisfaction of other firms hoping to be amongst the final six.
Despite featuring the ideas/logos sent to them in a on their blog, it would have been nice to get the public to vote for their favourite logo.
It’s a real shame the Greater London Authority didn’t come up with a similar idea themselves. How awesome would it be to ask Twitterers to create a logo for their city instead? There are plenty of talented designers on Twitter who could have done an amazing job at a fraction of the cost of a larger agency.
Let’s hope we avoid another 2012 Olympic logo fiasco. What do you guys think? 
| Print article | This entry was posted by Lolly on 02/09/2009 at 8:43 pm, and is filed under Creativity Unleashed. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
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about 2 years ago
I think that the problem here is that crowdsourcing might be good for generating lots of ideas but it's generally a bad way to produce a single thing of quality. The biggest examples of crowdsourcing on the web are good because they create multiple niche markets. This works.
What Moving Brand is doing is gradually moving towards something as inoffensive as possible. This is not good work in branding. And it completely undermines the value of designers and marketing people by making it appear that anyone can have a go at it. You wouldn't crowdsource an operation in hospital.
The entire purpose of the exercise is to create PR for Moving Brand (which is working) and not to create anything meaningful for London. Good design is about strong leadership and real problem-solving. I don't see any of that going on here. GLA are right to not approach it in this way. It cheapens the brand of London and attaches it firmly to a transient web-based social media platform (Twitter) that actually doesn't represent vast portions of the British public.
about 2 years ago
Hi @imagetext – thanks so much for the comment
I personally quite liked Moving Brands' approach as it helped them understand what (some) Londoners really want. The key finding from this exercise was that Londoners love the iconic London Underground logo, so why not incorporate it into a new logo for the city (I really like the 'Only London' logo BTW)
I used to work in branding and we regularly used focus groups to fine tune our ideas; Moving Brands did the exact same thing using Social Media.
I had a look at the pitch on their blog this morning, and I have to say that they perhaps focused a little too much on PRing themselves; including the various stats and coverage they got in the press was unecessary… Saying that I can't wait to find out whether they'll be shortlisted.
about 2 years ago
I didn't really get the impression that they used Twitter to fine tune ideas, rather that they used it to just source ideas. I agree that focus groups can work sometimes (and a lot of marketing people wouldn't even go that far), but having what amounts to an open competition just seems completely pointless.
Did they need Twitter to tell them that Londoners like what is possibly the most well-known, iconic transport logo in the world. They'll be uncovering the fact that the tube map is a great piece of information design next
about 2 years ago
I guess we'll find out soon enough whether they'll get shortlisted or not? Disqus is great! I like your blog BTW – bookmarked
about 2 years ago
I bet they do get shortlisted, just because no-one would want the backlash of not shortlisting them now. I like your blog too, especially as it has all the social media gadgetry I keep meaning to get installed on mine!