Some Background
Today saw the unveiling of the new EU organic products logo, chosen from entrants to a design competition. The competition was open to students from all 27 EU Member States. Entrants submitted designs to http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/logo/competition/competition_en.htm which were eventually narrowed down to three final designs to be voted for online.
The logo will be introduced to all pre-packed organic products from July 2010 and displaying the logo will be compulsary. The logo will show consumers that the product has gained a specific quality level to meet EU standards throughout the growing, manufacturing and packaging processes.
The competition was open for two months and received approximately 130,000 votes, the winning design by Dusan Milenkovic, a student from Germany, receiving a huge 63% of all votes.
The other two finalists:
My Thoughts
Now, out of the three logos in the shortlist I can see why the winner received the voting majority. There are clean lines and it’s simple – two great logo traits. However, there’s something that is just bothering me about this logo, I Just…don’t like it.
Sure it’s a great concept and does manage to represent both the Euro stars and the leaf but is it really that good? For a logo to be present on multiple product lines it needs to be extremely scalable. When this logo is scaled down the stars are unidentifiable, they just look like a series of dots. The details on the logo is too small in my opinion and that’s not all that bothers me. I even find myself grimacing at the shape of the stars. I can see that the designer outlined a leaf shape with stars and then warped them to create the effect but it just looks messy and amateurish. As if that isn’t enough, the overall shape seems to be a little…wrong. The leaf happily curves round to the left whilst the middle part that comes from the leaf stem curves round to the right.
Perhaps I’m being unreasonable here and over critical. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of this competition until today, and would have liked to see the other entries for comparison but these have now been removed from the competition web site.
So am I being over critical? I’d be interested to see why this is a deserving logo from those who disagree with me.
