Melbourne's identity crisis

Ian Brown, the hub agency, gives his two cents...

The response to the new Melbourne identity has been childish to say the least, and not just because the standard response is my 10 year old can do better.

Having seen the RMIT offerings on the Herald Sun blog I'd say it is quite clear that they can't. Those who say you have to be a Melbournian to design a logo for Melbourne quite obviously don't understand what it is to be a designer.

Would you say you have to be a plumber to design a logo for a plumber? Do you have to be a woman to design a feminine hygiene product? Do you have to have cancer to design a logo for the Cancer Council? Do you have to be a cat to design a logo for the RSPCA? No you wouldn't.

So why can't a professional designer from out of town create an identity for another city? Just because they are American owned doesn't mean they are full of Americans. It is an Australian design team.

Even if they were American, it doesn't matter because it is the designers' job to understand the hearts and minds of the audience. Why else would you have a brief? Why else would you do research? Why else would you spend weeks immersing yourself in a project, getting to know all the finer details of the client, when you can just get someone who thinks they understand the audience to knock something up in 2 hours for free?

So if only Melbournians are capable of designing a logo for Melbourne the reverse means Melbournians can't design anything for anyone outside their great city.

I've been trying to think of a comparable scenario where the volume of thought, creativity, time and research isn't really reflected in the end result. By that I mean you do all this work and all you get is a sheet of A4 with an image on it (discounting all the other work that was done on this project).

The best I can come up with is this. Branding is like a meal. Ultimately, all you get is a plate with a meal on it. But that plate represents all the creativity, hard work and effort that went into it. Some companies are like The Fat Duck or El Bulli.

They spend weeks and months researching trying iteration after iteration, changing and improving. For this you pay a price. But ultimately what you get is a meal on a plate. Now we can all produce a meal on a plate, but that doesn't make us chefs and it doesn't make us culinary experts either.

I've watched Heston Blumenthal on his TV show 'In Search of Perfection', and I have changed the way I cook many things and they do taste better. Having said this, I don't go round telling everyone I'm a chef and I could do it cheaper than him.

If you look at the work done for City of Melbourne as just a logo, which it isn't, it is so much more than that, then you have to consider it as a finely crafted and considered piece of work. The kind of work that takes months of iterations, trial and error.

Then months of development in extending that identity into brochures, posters, signage, street sweepers, parking tickets and guidelines to hand the identity on to those who will work with it every day. Hey kids are you still donating your work for nothing, because you just went out of business.

Back to the culinary line of thought and thinking of the designs as meals, I wouldn't even give some of the offerings by the RMIT students to my neighbour's cat, and I hate that f***ing cat. They are the kind of meals you create when you're a student. They are ginger biscuits on toast with Benadryl jus. For God's sake, one of them looks the Harbour Bridge on acid.

When I first heard about the furore over the new identity I was concerned that students offering their ideas for free would devalue the work done by Landor. In fact it has done the opposite. It shows just how important it is to spend time and money on research to investigate where your identity will be used and how it can successfully transfer across every conceivable medium a city might need.

So, for $240,000, what do you get? Well, $90,000 of research. So that's now $150,000 for an identity that consists of about 20 different variations for the logo, brochures, posters, signage, street sweepers, parking tickets, many other applications and guidelines.

So for everyone except the students, start to cost those up as individual projects based on your own fee structure. $150,000 for this much work, it's starting to look like a bargain to me.

Branding is much more than just creating a logo in 2 hours and placing it in the bottom left corner of every piece of communication you put together. Fortunately for Melbourne the powers that be know that, even if the design industry doesn't.