It’s June 2020, so if my sideburns look like were haphazardly attacked with scissors,
that’s because that is what happened..
Today I’ll going to be making a follow up to my video reviewing the 32 borough council
logos of London, by taking a look at some of the most notable council logos of days past.
This is going to be less of a structured video and more of a light-hearted look back at some
of London’s design history.
So let’s take a look.
Firstly, those of you from outside the UK, welcome!
I’m not sure how you got here, but I’m glad that you are.
But I feel I should maybe give you a little bit of context.
In my previous video I was pretty down on the range of mediocre coat of arms-based logos.
This is quite a culturally specific thing, and I can imagine how in a different context,
like in the States, a coat of arms is going to appear quite unique and stand out.
Here in London meanwhile, you can’t swing a proverbial cat without hitting some piece
of heraldry.
Every other pub has on the corner has its own coat of arms.
There are literally over a dozen pubs just within London called the Kings Arms.
Here’s a coat of arms for example – which lofty entity does it belong to?
The Twining’s tea company.
This is the Twining’s company crest, not to be confused with this different crest which
you see on every box of their teabags, which belongs to the Queen.
This is because Twining’s hold what’s called a royal warrant of appointment, which
are basically bragging rights a company can use for having supplied th British Royal family.
Over 600 UK companies hold a royal warrant, so you see this crest used by all sorts of
companies providing everything from tailoring to carpeting to jam.
This is partly why I find a badly executed crest so underwhelming as a logo for municipal
government.
When Westminster council make Twining’s poorly vectorised crest look good.
Well.
That’s just not my cup of tea.
Speaking of that auto-traced disgrace, once up on a time Westminster had a logo you could
use today, quite successfully.
It was used from the ‘70s until sometime probably in the ‘90s.
This recursive chevron design is almost reminiscent of a Sierpiński Triangle.
It’s quite fractal-like.
It works really well as a modernist take on the shield in the coat of arms.
Of course, this tight line patterning would need to be tweaked for use on-screens, but
with a bit of work this would make a very clean, modern and distinctive logo.
Which makes it an even bigger shame that they swapped it for this.
Speaking of bad coats of arms and squandered brand equity…
Before 2015, Kingston upon Thames actually had a very simple shield of three fish and
a crown motif for their primary logo.
So much more legible and own-able than their whole current situation.
I’m particularly fond of this cover from a 1967 guidebook.
Can you imagine how great this would look as a twitter avatar?
Instead we have this smashed cockroach.
On the topic of cool shields – Hello Merton!
What the hell?
You’re just going to leave this in a dusty history book?
Over this?
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Quite a few commenters on the previous video called Haringey their least favourite, and
I understand - I get it.
But personally, I will take a flawed logo that evokes hatred over a flawed logo that
evokes indifference 9 times out of 10.
I also mentioned in that video that what happened to the previous logo was far more egregious
to me.
So let me explain that.
Here is Haringey’s original “electric flash” logo from 1965 designed by modernist
architects and industrial designers John & Silvia Reid.
It’s just a magnificent piece of work.
It’s so boldly graphic and confident.
The first TV broadcast in the UK was sent out from Alexandra Palace in Haringey, and
that’s what the design evokes.
Unfortunately, here is what happened to it in 2007.
Now, I’m now going to make a reference which clearly cements me as an aging millennial,
but I cannot put it better than Strong Bad did, in the early 2000s.
I guess the No Loafing sign could take a cue from the fast-food, soft drink, and bad sports
team industries and combat sluggish sales and decades of losing with a slick logo redesign.
First you squish it, skew it, and turn it all around.
Squish it, skew it, turn it all around.
Now it's time to play Color Wheel Roulette.
No Whammies, no Whammies!
It’s almost as if they went to the “DO NOT DO” section of every brand identity
manual and went – yeah, let’s do all of that.
It’s just so disrespectful!
My heart… breaks when I see this.
But let’s just rewind and admire this logo as it was originally intended, or even better,
this fantastic shield variant.
Which I would literally stab a loved one with an apple pencil to get my hands on an enamel
pin version of this logo.
Now Islington is proof that it is possible to improve a logo by reverting to a coat of
arms if you make the effort to execute it well.
Their old logo is certainly simple and bold, that’s not the problem.
Personally, for me it evokes a magazine masthead more than a logo.
I could easily imagine it being used for a full-colour supplement in the Independent
or some other newsprint with I.
Slightly more importantly – tall vertical logos are just unwieldy.
Vertically oriented logos are rare in the wild.
The overwhelming majority of logos are landscape or close to square.
With social media avatars and app icons now, it’s more important than ever to have a
logo that works in a square format.
Also, for no particular reason, look at this amazing cover from 1986.
I feel like Austin Powers might approve.
But the prize for logo most of its era, has to go to this former logo for Barnet council.
It’s using Letraset Pump, which as far as typefaces go is a little bit…
Um, your fish are dead.
Yeah I know – I can’t get them out of there.
While it seems we now all associate this font and it’s various cousins with the ‘70s
and ‘80s, it actually has quite a history.
It stretches all the way back in fact to the birth of modernist architecture and design
in the ‘20s and ‘30s at the Bauhaus school of art in Germany, but that’s a video for
a different day.
Hammersmith & Fulham get runner up for this ‘80s logo which would look completely at
home embroidered on a pair of overalls at your local mechanic.
Hounslow’s current logo is actually quite good, but there’s just something quirky
and interesting about this ‘70s logo of theirs – it’s like part H, part chess
rook, part Twister ice-cream.
Despite my obvious oversight of not recognisign Battersea power-station, I stand by my low
score given to Wandsworth for their skyline logo.
But if you are a fan, get ready to fill your boots with this duo from Croydon, one ‘80s
and one ‘90s.
You just don’t see that Serpentine font around anymore – I think it lives exclusively
in the basements of second-hand book shops on the covers of bad sci-fi novels.
Here’s also a post Y2K logo from Bexley.
Seen all together as a set, I feel like the weaknesses of this concept shine through.
It just looks generic and clip-arty, especially to those not acquainted with local landmarks.
It actually takes a lot of skill and time to take a piece of architecture and turn it
into a good graphic symbol, and none of these logos have invested either resource into their
efforts.
London’s greatest natural landmark, of course, has to be the River Thames itself, and both
Tower Hamlets and Greenwich have made specific reference to its geography in their previous
logos.
Perhaps because they share some of its most distinctive bends?
Most improved has to go to Lambeth Council, who I feel have a quite a handsome logo now,
but they seem to have spent quite a bit of time wandering in the typographic wilderness
before they arrived to where they were going.
Poor Newham, who came bottom of the logo shootout, actually had something a little bit more interesting
going on previously.
This stylised N probably wasn’t setting the world on fire, but I think it actually
was more successful than similar concept that Enfield tried to pull off.
(Nice pun by the way).
But when you look at where they went next from here, in the next version you can kind
of still see the line of the N in this broken ribbon device.
But then it just completely disappears like a vestigial tail by the time we get to the
present day.
It’s just not that difficult to imagine an alternative universe where they leaned
into their original N logo and came up with a something quite distinctive, simple and modern.
To finish I have two easter eggs to share with you:
Firstly, while researching my initial video, I made a lot of the Wayback Machine, to establish
the dates when current logos were introduced.
Let me assure you - there are some absolute corkers amongst those old websites, but my
favourite, purely for its abuse of photoshop effects, has to go to Havering.
It looks like Barnet weren’t the only fans of this particular flavour of font, except
that Havering chose it in 2005.
Finally, there is a logo which I completely forgot to include in my original breakdown
video.
Somehow, I missed this one.
Probably because the London Borough of Walford is the fictional setting of the long running
British soap opera, EastEnders.
This image actually comes from a fan wiki, so I was a slightly dubious at first about
its origins.
But then I was able to verify its usage on screen, with this screen-shot.
Now between this logo and this logo – hands down, I have to give it to Walford.
The typography is cleaner and more legible, the colour is fresher, the swoosh – while
it’s still a swoosh – is at least symmetrical!
In fact, in light of this new evidence, I may have to retroactively crown Barking and
Dagenham the worst council logo in all of London.
They were basically simultaneously parodied and outshone by a production designer at the
BBC who probably threw this together in 20 minutes.
A huge thank you to the amazing work of @lccmunicpal account on twitter – this video wouldn’t
have been impossible without their research, and basically all of the old logos in this
video were provided from their archives for me, very kindly.
There is a fantastic article on their blog called the Lost Logos of London’s Boroughs.
If this kind of sort of thing that you geek out over, you should absolutely go and give
them a follow.
Secondly, I want to thank you for watching all the way until the end – this channel
is still quite new, so if you enjoy these videos about logos, fonts and design, please
do all the YouTube things, engage the algorithms.
And it just helps more people to discover these videos and I really would appreciate
that.
I’m currently working on another long-form video on Microsoft’s default fonts, but
my plan is to go back and do another logo roast and rank, in perhaps a little while.
I think I should extend my horizons beyond just London next.
I’d love to hear what you think.
Please leave me any questions you have, or suggestions for things you’d like to see
me cover in the future.
My name is Linus, I’ve been ranting about logos.
I hope to see you again in a future video.