Announcing 30 days of better logos
About this:
That was going to be UW's new marketing logo. A while ago it was was leaked to LiveJournal, among other places. You can see my initial reaction here.
But according to Friday's daily bulletin, and a spot on the CTV news tonight, the university is abandoning all hopes of actually using the logo in marketing. Good.
In the spirit of helping UW design a better logo, I want to enumerate all the problems I had with the laser-tastic abomination up there. It is my hope that explicitly pointing out the problems with "Waterpew" will help the university avoid such atrocious design again.
Without further ado, here are the problems with the logo:
- The colour depth isn't easily reduced. When designing a new logo, you can't assume it'll always be shown in a nice full-colour medium, like a computer monitor or a glossy magazine. One needs to think: how will it look in a newspaper? On a monochrome e-ink display? After it's been photocopied and sent via fax? Checkout the logo in greyscale, it just looks like a muddy mess. (Also, obligatory black-and-white).
- There were too many colours to begin with. Logos should have a limited palette. This is so the logo can be easily greyscaled, but also so there are specific colours tied to the logo. That is what helps you market a brand. Also, all those bright lasers crossing other bright lasers violated the rule of tincture.
- It wasn't clean, and looked like a bunch of random. Whenever you have a bunch of lines, there should be meaning to those lines. The lines should encode something awesome, rather than look like a pile of a bunch of pick-up sticks.*
- There was nothing "UW" about it. I heard the different lines represent the different faculties. Yeah yeah. But, every school has a bunch of faculties. What about this logo represents UW in particular? There's no connection between this logo and our previous branding (black & gold, lions rampant, the chevron) and who we actually are (geeks).
To UW Vice-President External Relations Meg Beckel, and the University marketing department: I hope I have clearly established that the problems I had with this logo aren't due to "impressions of the logo without any context or rationale". It's just...really, really bad.
Over the next 30 days, I will post one potential UW logo of my own creation, aiming for one post for each day in September. Some will be serious. Some will be absurd. Some probably won't be much good, and I doubt any will be as slick as Concordia's logo. But, I guarantee they'll be better than the laser show up there. With every post I will explain why the logo of the day is better, which I hope will result in further ideas for good logo design. Or at least, better logo design.
There are many reasons I want to take on the 30 day, 30 logo challenge. I want to show that the average person does have something to contribute to the brainstorming process. It's a personal challenge for me to improve my drawing, and also update my blog daily. Finally, Meg Beckel said the university will "seek online feedback from stakeholders interested in participating in our identity project". I want to hold the administration to that by generating so many ideas (through both my designs and your feedback) that we can't possibly be ignored.
I am by no means a graphic design expert, but I'll do the best I can. You'll see my first UW logo candidate tomorrow, on September 1.
For those who object to my characterization of UW students as "geeks": we are. Meet some students from other universities sometime. On average, we are by far the geekiest. That is what makes us awesome. If there were a more nerdtacular university somewhere else in Canada, I would have gone there instead.
* EDIT 2009-09-28: I met UW VP External Relations Meg Beckel yesterday. She told Feds council that the lines in the logo are actually from a harmonograph. So, they're not actually random despite that appearance. Apologies.