Please

Please

For What it's Worth...

21 January 2005
Filed under Business, Design, Politics, Text, The Interweb

Yesterday, I kept vague track of two parallel, yet unrelated, discussions about the intrinsic value of logos and trademarks. The first to come to my attention, via the local morning news, surrounded a Victorian State Government plan to spend $650,000 creating a logo to promote Victoria in the international market; the second was a post (and subsequent extended discussion in the comments) on Greg Storey's Airbag calling for entries in a competition to design a logo for a new financial services company owned by one of Greg's friends. (If there's an Australian Blog Award for 'longest sentence', I'm sure to clean up with that one).

With regard to the first: whether or not the Victorian Government needs a new logo is not really relevant. Cynical people would probably see the act of re-branding, deep into a second term of office, when recent opinion polls show support dropping below 50% for the first time, as pissing to mark territory, and the Opposition's reaction to the plan certainly suggests that they see it like that. But what really interests me is the coverage of the issue: last night's Channel 7 news (not my preferred news outlet, but I was watching Lley-Lley) ran footage of a high-school art class making potential logos OUT OF WOOD, mocking the very idea of a $650,000 logo design process, and actually gave airtime to Opposition leader Robert Doyle's desperate attempt at "subvertising" the current logo. In general, the lack of interest in the function of such a logo, and the 'value for money', has been pretty astonishing, as has the Government's inability to state their case clearly enough for the press to bother repeating it.

None of this would have made a particular impact, however, had it not been for me stumbling on the Airbag article. I'm uneasy about spec-work or pitching (even when it's called, more attractively, a 'competition'), and was formulating a tentative response, before realising that hundreds of others had already done it for me. What really stuck out was that SO MANY people were offended by the merest suggestion that a design competition might devalue design - even when those proposing it (and I would have been one of them) took great care to say that they didn't think the intention was necessarily bad.

Anyway, all of this is just a very long-winded way of saying that if even designers - and those paying vast amounts of money to employ them - still have to argue about whether design has any essential worth (and by extension, whether design is devalued by asking for it to be done for nothing, or peanuts) then we're in trouble, and I'm, to quote Greg Storey himself, taking up fridge repair.

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