Article from today's The Globe and Mail - Toronto Unlimited: A bad new brand for the city
(Note: It would probably tell you something that initially I read the word "brand" as "bland"...)
There was no applause, neither gasps nor boos, indeed no reaction whatsoever when the massed bureaucrats and consultants triumphantly unveiled Toronto's new brand identity, with logo and tagline, in the Distillery District last week. But it would be unfair to say that the silence was stunned.
Instead it was the silence of typically Torontonian resignation: Sure the brand is bad, we silently reflected -- corporate, witless, uninspired. But it could be worse. Instead of merely banal, it could be embarrassing. So let us be thankful for small mercies.
But that slow cringe curdled into a full cramp this weekend when the same bureaucrats and consultants rolled out our new brand in a two-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times. The ad's main message, titled "Toronto: an eclectic tour of an eclectic city," is more than embarrassing. It is all-out excruciating.
It would take the rest of this column simply to enumerate the grammatical errors in those few short paragraphs, without even considering their pomposity, emptiness and pathetic dependence on idiotic clichés. Toronto is "perhaps" the most underrated city in North America, it begins, known mainly for cleanliness and politeness.
"And while all these answers are true. It is barely scratching the surface. Toronto is one of those rare instances where its true unique nature makes it difficult to describe without being cliché."
Thus our anonymous author -- likely one of the New York experts Tourism Toronto hired to provide us with an identity -- licenses himself to pile on the clichés, in the same tortured, unreadable style. The ad reads like an instant Google translation of a Japanese website. Its main message is that Toronto is a city of sub-literate poseurs with nothing, nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing to say.
Truth in advertising, you say? Ouch.
Although Mayor David Miller was unavailable yesterday, his press secretary went out of his way to provide "no comment" on the ad, volunteering in addition that both it and the entire $4-million branding effort is a project of Tourism Toronto, not the city, and financed largely by that group's hotel levy.
Others are not so reticent. While the new logo may simply seem dull to the rest of us, more than one local designer considers it offensive. "It's really sad, it's unprofessional, it's backwards," sighed award-winning designer Art Niemi of Atlanta Art and Design. "But it probably represents Toronto perfectly. No one here ever seems to have time to find the best and the brightest."
Mr. Niemi is especially nonplussed to know why the designers chose a 1920s Bauhaus typeface to represent modern Toronto. And the way the already weak logo is undermined by its transformation into musical notes and sperm-shaped balloons
[Transcriber's note: ....huh?] drives him crazy. "To a graphic designer looking at that, it's as bad as if they misspelled the word Toronto," he says.
The tragedy is that Tourism Toronto and its camel-making partners in this effort began by rejecting two entirely credible efforts -- both a new mark and slogan.
The slogan, produced on the fly by a local agency virtually in the midst of the SARS crisis, was "You belong here." It was both an appropriately friendly come-on to tourists and a simple, affecting statement of the modern city's proudest achievement, its huge inclusiveness.
Instead, we adopted "unlimited," which is meaningless.
The mark was created in the same flush by Bruce Mau, not only a Torontonian but probably the most famous graphic designer alive. It was a striking, canted "T" built up from individual "pixels" that could be shaded or filled with imagery to convey any number of messages without undermining the strong presence of the basic device.
The slogan quickly began appearing everywhere, graffiti-style, and Mr. Mau was ready to start printing T-shirts and shopping bags almost two years ago.
But instead of taking a risk with something fresh, spontaneous and popular, the bureaucrats went to New York. It was an expensive trip, with excruciating results.
- by John Barber
Heh. I like that part about the ad being like a Google-translated Japanese website. :)
