Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

soccer brand

German designer Erik Spiekermann doesn’t have very many nice things to say about the branding for this year’s World Cup.

First, there are too many messages. The original brief was: we’ve got to fit Germany in there, then 2006, then FIFA, plus we’ve got to have some happy people in there, we need green for the lawn, we’ve got the German national colors. So there’s green and black and red and yellow and happy faces and FIFA, just way too many messages. You can look at this and count the elements and it just flies in the face of effective communication.

(Deutsche Welle: “Top Designer Says World Cup Design ‘Just Embarrassing’” - 06/12/06)

Personally, I found the cutesy logo fairly inoffensive. It was pretty easy to design around, and, as some of the commenters on The Skinny have pointed out, it’s not especially better or worse than previous World Cup branding. But I do agree that it doesn’t say “soccer” at all, and it does seem like a tortured, calculated product of design-by-committee.

(Link found via The Skinny.)