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09.11.09
So. London?

It’s the 9th of November, and those of you with longish memories will remember that 8 days ago we should have witnessed the grand unveiling of the new logo for London. But we didn’t.

So what’s happened? Well, there were 56 entrants to the tender which famously asked for ‘some creative ideas’ and it seems that quite a few did exactly that. It quickly got whittled down to a shortlist of six who met our man Boris the Mayor, then four more were booted out (including The Partners who promptly wrote this).

So it was down to two, one of which was Conran (yes, they of restaurants and shops) and the other still remains undisclosed (although rumours suggest that it could be Dragon brands/Dragon Rouge, they of Consignia fame, but that’s unconfirmed). All slightly odd. Conran have even revealed that their idea is based on the principle of an open quote mark. Er, OK, great.

The design tender took place at the same time as one for PR and for the running of a ‘public engagement programme’  (we think that’s code for market research), and the working budget was about half a million (pounds). Several of our sources and one Deep Throat who refuses to be named report that the final presentation of the three pronged strategy and design options went badly.

So badly that the steering group (on sight of their options) collectively asked ‘why are we doing this?’ to the marketing project leader, at which point the flaxen-haired one also asked ‘why are we doing this?’ Not good.

Incidentally, in case you’re wondering if we got feedback from the GLA about our tender, we were told we were too expensive (always a good place to be, happy with that).

We’ve since heard off-the-record feedback that any group involved with any of the previous work for any constituent part was immediately discounted (which swiftly took johnson banks, Saffron, Wolff Olins and Interbrand out of the equation, that’s if they even got involved).

But the man at the GLA was very nice about it.

Our original piece on this is here, since re-blogged by Creative Review here with the obligatory millions of comments.

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Thought for the week is a regular posting-place for the visual and verbal observations of London design consultancy johnson banks.

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