19 March 2024, Tuesday, 13:12
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What does Minsk need a second-rate brand for?

What does Minsk need a second-rate brand for?

Experts unanimously call second-rate the idea of the new logotype and the English language slogan of the Belarusian capital.

We would remind that the new graphic symbol of Minsk City will become a blue-white pattern (a repeated pattern scheme), which bring up associations with a computer system board. The brand’s developers even made up an original name for the color – “Minsk Azure”. The representatives of the public council, who approved of the concept of the visual style of the Minsk’s brand, called the decision unexpected. The English variant of the slogan will be "Think Minsk". The working variant of the Russian language slogan is “Minsk. Interesting”, but they have not yet developed a slogan in Belarusian.

In couple hours after the publication of the new logotype internet users have found tons of similar variants on special databases of designer elaborations. The idea of a system board logotype is stale, to put it mildly.

But the borrowing of idea did not stop there. A slogan with the English word “Think” is used, probably, even more broadly. It is enough to bring up the slogans “Think” of IBM and “Think Different” of Apple. And whereas playing with the slogans of the leading IT giants could have been justified, than the variant of the design-studio Johnson Banks, offered as a rebranding for London before the Olympics, hints unequivocally at the author of the original idea.

And it is not only the slogan itself, but also the font and the color scheme. The “London Azure” is worth a lot by itself.

The borrowing of the London ideas is not accidental. As the head of the Institute for State Ideologies (INSTID) – this British company with Belarusian roots won the tender for creation of a Minsk’s brand – Aliaksandr Grand boasted at the end of summer 2012, the experts who have performed the branding program for London, would be working on the project. One shall assume that Jeremy Hilldreth and David Adam personally picked up ideas from competing design companies.

On the other hand, 30 thousand dollars, which the Minsk City executive committee was ready to spend, cannot compare to the 600 thousand pounds, which the London’s city hall spent for the creation of their own brand. Not a single known British designer would seriously take over deep development and offer original ideas for this kind of money. Probably, INSTID will explain to us the suggested second-hand exactly with that argument.

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