The City of Melbourne unveiled a new logo this week, and it's already being described as the Yellow Peril's second coming—perhaps appropriate given the stylistic similarities. It's been labelled by one local talkback radio station as 'logogate'. The public, apparently, hates it.
Writing in the Age yesterday, Anson Cameron made some jokes based around it's cost—namely that, as a writer, the most you could hope to get paid for a word $3. This, then, was a letter for $240,000. Coverage extended onto Brand New and the AGDA member's site—a small internet survey on Brand New suggests the support for the logo amongst graphic designer's was overwhelmingly positive.
So where does the level of disconnection between the public and the design profession occur? Why do we have two such vastly differing opinions for one single logo? I think it can be put down to two things.
Firstly, the general public has little interest in graphic design—any designer could hardly count number of times they've had to explain what it is we actually do. This lack of interest comes from the natural design inclination to hide the process behind the result—a magic trick is always more impressive if you don't tell someone how you did it—and the closed loop nature of design communication. We talk to each other in such a way that discourages exterior critique, and we commit this exclusion because we feel that the public is not qualified to have an opinion on our work, or that their opinion is not as important as that of our peers.
It's a two way street, though: at least some of this disinterest comes from the fact that what we do is seen as 'surface' work. We are the icing on the cake—pretty and sweet, but ultimately unsatisfying. If we accept this as the standard public attitude, it's no wonder we get articles like this in the Herald Sun or, horrifyingly, public competition and disparaging comments about the cost of design. It's clear from these articles that we need a way of improving the visual language of the public, but, perhaps more importantly, we also need a clear way of telling them how much it costs to get something designed.
The $240,000 fee is the real sticking point in the debate. All the public sees is a quarter of a million spent on a fat, blocky M with some lines drawn on it. They'll say things like 'my 4yr old could've done that' and then ask about ratepayers and arts funding. They don't realise that more goes on behind the scenes than a simple fat, blocky M, and, yes, someone actually tries to make a living off doing this. I'm not sure how many people Landor had working on this, but $240,000 for a complete rebranding doesn't seem astronomical to me.
Secondly, for designers in Melbourne, there's the Sydney issue. As we continue to face the effects of the economic downturn (and will do so for some time), design business is struggling. Smaller, local studios have barely enough work to get by and are simply not replacing the staff that leave, while many more are turning to self-directed projects just so they can have something to do. To see a big, local contract go to a multi-national located in Sydney, of all places, hurts. It hurts even more when you realise that Melbourne has built something of a reputation for being the design capital of Australia.
A study by Design Victoria showed the amazing strength of the design industry in Victoria, and the benefits of using those resources. It's sad to see Melbourne City Council ignore the recommendations of this report and ship out their design to Landor when there are so many talented firms in Melbourne that could have done a logo that truly represented us a city, rather than us as Federation Square.
