Tories plan a low-cost rollout of 2017 logo

Whether you like it or loathe it, it appears the logo and brand identity for Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017 won’t cost taxpayers very much.

The federal government paid University of Waterloo student Ariana Cuvin $5,000 for her winning design in a student logo contest, but design professionals warned it would cost many times that to integrate it into a proper brand platform.

“They’re going to have to try to build a strategy and a brand around it,” said Matthew Warburton, design manager in the University of British Columbia’s communications and marketing department. And that, he said, could easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, maybe not. The Department of Canadian Heritage said Tuesday its in-house design and creative team “will adapt the artwork into different formats, create a graphic standard manual, handle the trademark process, and so on.”

Moreover, the department said it spent nothing in the last fiscal year on the creation of logos.

“Day-to-day design services for a variety of products, activities and events are conducted in-house by the department’s graphic designers.”

It’s worth noting that Canadian Heritage’s in-house designers were responsible for five unsuccessful 2017 logos that were criticized as bland, boring and banal in focusgroup testing in 2013. Their failure ultimately spawned the student design competition won by Cuvin.

To Todd Falkowsky, publisher of the Canadian Design Resource, the biggest design site in Canada, the government’s approach to the branding of the sesquicentennial is “kind of embarrassing.”

“It feels like bush league,” he said. “The United States wouldn’t have the department of whatever managing this. This would be a big investment grade opportunity. They would try to find ways of taking the American story global, how the look and the identity can be part of that thinking. It’s another example of how Canada just can’t seem to get the pieces right.”

Canada’s centennial celebrations in 1967 still resonate with those who lived through them, Falkowsky said.

“It’s not just that they had a killer logo. The memories of that moment in time are huge. I think 150 is going to come by and I’m not sure if Canadians are going to get amped on it. We can’t even get the logo straight.”

Perhaps predictably, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has no complaints. “It would be a very cold day in July where we would be upset about the government doing something very, very efficiently,” said Aaron Wudrick, the federation’s president.

“Obviously, $5,000 is a bargain, and it’s certainly not chump change for the winner of the contest,” Wudrick said. “I think it’s a win all around.”

Whether the process will produce a memorable brand identity for Canada’s sesquicentennial, however, is debatable. Design industry professionals say the logo contest effectively put the cart before the horse.

“The logo itself is not the brand,” said Warburton, who likens a logo to an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence.

“The sentence is the brand. The story is the brand. The logo is just that little reminder at the very end — this is what it’s all about and this is what it’s connected to,” Warburton said.

“When you do a logo contest, you don’t get that. You just get a logo. You don’t get any of the other thinking.”

That likely means the Canada 2017 logo will never achieve its full potential, said Lionel Godoury, a past president of the Association of Registered Graphic Designers.

If the government had approached the logo and brand differently, “they could very well have had a top-tier designer or design studio take on a project like this, even on a pro bono basis,” said Godoury, who is principal and creative director of Context Creative in Toronto.

Roberto Dosil, a graphic designer and publisher who conceived of and commissioned a 2002 book on the history of the maple leaf flag, said relying on members of the public to design important national symbols is unwise because it’s hit or miss.