Concordia steals sheep
My alma mater unveiled its new logo today.
Seeing the history of former logos alongside it, I long for the heraldic authoritativeness of the 1978 shield, and the typographic friendliness of the 1988 version. This new one could be a logo for a dentist’s office.
Not only does it have atrocious visual balance, with the “shield” or remnants thereof being too close to the text, the maroon elements completely overshadow the background tan elements. And why, o why, did they use such a heavy font, then letterspace the lowercase letters?
Frederic Goudy is spinning in his grave.
January 19, 2007 12:14 PM
Comments
Yuck. That’s a really terrible revision they’ve done.
The ‘shield’ is all swoopy like some kind of dot-com-era nightmare and the type! They took something that was distinctive yet approachable - and accessible throughout the University community - and moved as far away from it as possible, evidently. The wide tracking between letters is just ridiculous.
Also note the failure in the use of colour - the small University/Université is so washed out that it positively disappears, and will be completely unusable in smaller sizes or in more restrictive palettes. Imagine this on a fax, for instance!
wrote Michael on January 19, 2007 2:08 PM
worse than a dentist’s office, it looks like the logo for some low-rent “e-learning” online training service or correspondence college. yecch.
now the 1978 one? there’s a university logo.
wrote optimuscrime on January 21, 2007 11:17 PM
Any logo designer worth their salt knows to avoid using CMYK colour combinations for fine or small elements, because at even moderately reduced sizes, they will “fuzz out” due to the halftone printing process. Worse, with cheap printing you have the problem of misregistration, where the colour plates aren’t exactly aligned…which exacerbates the problem.
Optimus, I think the 1978 one is the most “trad” or “rockist” if we are to use that term, it’s nice and solid looking, although the tightly spaced Times Roman isn’t the best. A combination of the 1978 crest with the 1988 typography (or an updated version of same) would have worked perfectly well.
Then again, maybe what we’re saying here is that for its stated aims, the new logo doesn’t go far enough. If they wanted to rebrand as a modern university of the future, maybe they should have taken the architecture of the new EV and John Molson buildings into account and done something more radical.
Oh yeah, am I the only one who also hates that scan-line-font “Concordia” banner they’ve put on all the buildings in recent years, and the glass front of the Hall building?
wrote AJ Kandy on January 22, 2007 10:22 AM
Okay ew, I really dislike the new logo. It’s wishy-washy, has no real form and yes, it may as well be a dentist’s logo.
wrote zura on January 19, 2007 1:15 PM