$250,000 Logo

[dictionary]

Melbourne's $240,000 makeover
Different versions of Melbourne's new logo.

Kate Lahey
July 22, 2009 - 2:42PM
Melbourne, the brand, has been given a $240,000 facelift and the result is a big M.

Lord Mayor Robert Doyle has unveiled a new logo for the city, which will replace the previous M and leaf symbol introduced in the early 1990s.

Cr Doyle said the old logo was "a bit daggy" and Melbourne needed a new design to reflect its cool sophistication on the world stage.

"The world's changed, the city of Melbourne has changed, this organisation has changed as well, and we're now playing far more, not just on the national stage but also on the international stage," Cr Doyle said.

Preliminary research for the new brand cost the council $91,000 and the design itself cost $148,000, Cr Doyle said.

But he defended the cost, saying the new logo would save the council money in the long run by gradually replacing about 50 different logos the city now uses for its various services.

Designing those logos cost about $90,000 a year, excluding brand maintenance costs.

Monash University marketing expert Francis Farrelly described the new logo as ``OK''.

"It certainly doesn't jump out at me immediately, it reminds me a little bit of some of the early incarnations of the MTV logo with the big M,'' he said.

Associate Professor Farrelly said Melbourne's brand had needed refreshing and the cost had not been excessive.

But he said the logo would be meaningless without improvements to the city to back it up.

"Given the brand of this city ... is not at its brightest period, then putting out a new bold logo like this is all good but it needs to be supported,'' Associate Professor Farrelly said.

"It's not going to mean anything unless people can identify with it and feel that we're in a renaissance period and a bunch of things are going to happen to bring Melbourne back to genuinely being in the best three or four cities in the world.''

Associate Professor Farrelly said the logo would only live up to the City of Melbourne's spin if matched with events, beautification programs and increased safety.

"If it is a brand logo and it is just words then it's a bit like crocodile tears, the tears are there but they don't actually mean anything,'' he said.

Cr Doyle said the council would not spend any additional money on rolling out the new logo because it would be gradually introduced as signs, uniforms, stationery and other branded products needed replacing.

Cr Doyle said the old logo was produced in a different era - when Joan Kirner was premier and Lindy Chamberlain was being compensated for wrongful conviction.

"If I recall accurately I was listening to MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, and I still can't understand that," he said.


with Mex Cooper

Just wondering what everyone thinks about the design wether or not it makes melbourne look like an atractive viberant place for australians and non australians and wether or not its worth a quater of a million...


New Logo Range

New Logo

Old Logo

[partietraumatic]

personally i think the companies that charge such large amounts of money to come up with these logos are rip offs. I bet they spent ages doing lots of research and could give a whole blurb about how the 'vibrancy of the logo reflects the vibrancy of melbourne' or some rubbish like that. In fact someone couldve come up with that for free on paint!

The london 2012 logo cost £400 000 and is rubbish. Grr.

[Just Adam]

i think they both suck hahaha

i could do better with ms paint in 5 mins and ill charge you £5....

no actually wait ill take the 90,000 if they are stupid enough to pay it for an M then they deserve to be ripped off >.>


actually...this took about 10 mins i got interupted but still... for ms paint and no budget i thought i did ok melboune with lots of water

[dictionary]

I actualy don't mind it... i realy think sometimes you need to pay good money to get good design.... just like how the worlds best buildings are all designed by architects the logo it self didnt cost $250000 the branding development as a total did...

I actualy like the old logo it says alot... the leaf is for melbourne's parks and gardens... the thing inside the leaf is for melbournes architecture and buildings.. and im not sure what the yellow thing is but possibly for the gold that built melbourne? IDK

But I think the new logo says just as much about melbourne, its pattern i asume is derived from federation square the colours symbolise the vast diversity of the city in all things..

[Tim]

The old one was much better... XD

[Hoppip]

Originally Posted by Myzou

The old one was much better... XD

Seconded. Actually by now that's more like... fourthed. The newer one looks more 1980's than anything, in my opinion. Granted I was born in the 1990's, but still... I've played Vice City, eh?

[KittyBoy]

They did the exact same with Sydney, without consent of the public, and have seriously screwed things up! Now they are talking of changing it back and it will cost even more to restore it!

[George]

I don't mind the new logo. Melbourne's going through massive changes at the moment, both in the places we live in but also the look of the city, the people we attract and our infrastructure.

The logo is coming with completely revamped transport infrastructure over the entire city costing about $41bn I think. Keep in mind Melbourne isn't small in size. We may have "only" 3.9 million people living in the city but with our urban sprawl we're the 25th largest city in the world in physical size and our transport infrastructure has been extremely hard to manage, but now we're getting tunnels from one end of the city to the other, copious amounts of new highways, freeways and bypasses as well as new roads, train lines and tram lines.

The entire suburb of Dandenong is practically being ripped down and rebuilt, with new boulevards, housing estates and boutiques and apartments.
Southbank is being beautified, with new pedestrian-only zones (St. Kilda Rd is going to become a pedestrian-only zone for the arts centre for certain hours of the day) and a lot of new parks are going in.
The CBD has lots of new development going on as well as new infrastructure going in.

$250,000 isn't really that bad, considering how many services this logo covers. Also keep in mind Victoria isn't exactly strapped for cash at the moment. Our economy is still growing at over 1% each quarter and though there's the massive redevelopment of all the townships affected by the Black Saturday bushfires, the government still has money to spend on infrastructure for us too.
Within 5-6 years Melbourne will be a completely different place to live in. Keep in mind though it is still a nice place to live at the moment, but it's going through many more changes to be even better.

Also I thought I'd just mention that there's been plans for a little while to extend Federation Square over the railyards. The government plans to cover the ugly railway tracks and build on top (so that section of the train network will essentially become underground). And built on top would be either a lot of garden areas and low rise office and apartment buildings (below 30 floors), or they might do a carbon-neutral city from what I've read.

Also our sports precinct is being extended with Melbourne Rectangular Stadium and there are plans for more developments there in future.

So with the logo, does anyone know if it'll cover all of Melbourne or just the CBD, Southbank and the Docklands? I hope it covers all of Melbourne.. I hate the City of Casey logo for my LGA. >_<

[Bevo]

I hate these corporate-type logos! They have no significance whatsoever, and they cost way too much for what you actually get

Personally i'd prefer this for melbourne:


The original coat of arms

[Jeimuzu]

I like the new one actually. And considering how much money Melbourne has, the price could be much worse. I remember one time my local town - Redcar - was to have a logo developed. They spent a lot of money (five figure sum, I think) on a firm from London, nowhere near us. They didn't understand our significance in industry, tourism from the 1800-1950s, and so on. For a small town, we've had an impact on the world.

Guess what the logo they came up with was? It was a small crayon drawing of a red car. At the unveiling, one man stood up and said "My six year old son draws better than that."

So if you think your Melbourne logo is bad, trust me it's damn good in comparison.

[olides84]

When I moved to my current city, I saw this logo everywhere



Well not the text so much, just the 'A'. And I thought, shit what a weak-ass logo anybody could have come up with that.

But then after a year here, seeing the 'A' logo absolutely everywhere, on buildings, signs, flags, banners, letterhead, city vehicles, patches on uniforms, etc., I can see that it really does define the city. So I'd say it's not the logo so much but it's how pervasive it's used in everything a city does and is involved in.

[davo-man]

I quite like it. To be fair, it doesn't fully incorporate everything that Melbourne is about, however that would be impossible in a single logo. It's eye catching, memorable and vibrant, which are important. Even more important (in terms of it being a logo design) is that it is easily resizeable (it won't be distorted if shrunk down to business card size or blown up to billboards), it's able to be put into black/white without it losing any of it's meaning, and it's incredibly simple, meaning that it can be easily drawn/created in any software and converted to 3D quite simply.

With my (somewhat meager) three years of learning about design, I give it my tick of approval

It's pretty awfull really, i mean you could quite easily get that sort of design for free by asking a high school/college Computer design class to do it . That price is a joke too.
Isle of wight county councill recently decided to create a new isle of wight flag and it's atrociously bad. I'm on my phone's wap so can't post a pic, but, if memory serves me right, it basically consists of two shades of blue partitioned horizontally with an out line of the island , which is vaguely like a flattened diamond shape, with 3 squiggles beneath... The design company got paid a tidy sum for producing that piece of arse gravey as well, the thieving bastards. What a waste of money.

[dictionary]

Originally Posted by George

So with the logo, does anyone know if it'll cover all of Melbourne or just the CBD, Southbank and the Docklands? I hope it covers all of Melbourne.. I hate the City of Casey logo for my LGA. >_<

Yeah it will cover the LGA of the City of Melbourne so parkvile, carlton, docklands and the cbd ect....

I hate these corporate-type logos! They have no significance whatsoever, and they cost way too much for what you actually get

Personally i'd prefer this for melbourne:


The original coat of arms

I spose it's a bit like how Wesley College Melbourne has a realy nice crest (imo) however uses just a Lion as its logo to fit in with its marketing campaign i spose...

[George]

Originally Posted by dictionary

Yeah it will cover the LGA of the City of Melbourne so parkvile, carlton, docklands and the cbd ect....

Damn, that doesn't include City of Casey all the way out in South-East Melbourne.