How Dalton Maag saw the new logo

At Dalton Maag we're passionate about design, and admire good design of every kind, especially typographic. Unfortunately, we see brands launch with shoddy, misjudged typography every day, with professional courtesy making us reluctant to publicly criticize the work of others. But London 2012 is more important than professional courtesy.

Get London 2012's brand wrong, with careless and misguided design ready to be seen around the world, and London's design community will lose the credentials for good and inspirational design which it has rightly earned. Get it badly wrong and there's a risk that London's designers become a laughing-stock in every visually-literate country.

Through "careful research" into what appeals to today's youth we have a logo which was dated before it even appeared, and in five years' time will appeal to neither the grown-up youth of today nor the youth of 2012. It's admirable to want to engage young people, but a brand which is so easily and mercilessly mocked by young and old simply won't appeal.

Through a misguided belief in the longevity of "cutting-edge" design, the branding agency has somehow managed to deliver a design straight out of the mid-80s. Perhaps more at home fronting a teen sitcom or 20-year-old TV sketch show, this is an example of "yoof" branding gone horribly wrong.

In conclusion, the London 2012 brand is based on a questionable, and poorly researched, animated idea which only works within an animated environment. Reduce it to a static image at business card size and the word "London" and the famous rings will fracture and become illegible. This conversion into static media is feeble and the final product, from animation to logo, is poorly executed; from incoherent abstract shapes to blobby, blotchy, carelessly unrefined type, this is a brand that simply won't perform cross-media, and hopelessly fails to capture the spirit of London 2012.

In January 2006 Bruno Maag wrote in Creative Review about the importance of typographic branding for London 2012.