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  • May 6, 2009
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Branding Romania. First Step.

In the past, there have been countless attempts to build a national brand for Romania through advertising campaigns. There were also quite a few discussions in the media and on BrandingRomania.com, aimed at raising awareness on what building a nation brand really means (as opposed to wasting money on TV commercials aired on the Discovery Channel). Eventually, it seems that the Romanian Ministry of Tourism got on the right track and started a public tender for the first part of the branding process, a project valued at EUR 2 million. A second part, valued at EUR 75 million is supposed to be targeted at communicating the new brand.

While the tender brief specifically requests expertise in nation branding, it seems that advertising agencies still can’t keep their hands off. Here’s the list of all tender participants:

Word of God

I’ve had a sweet tooth for typography for a long time, and a sweeter one for non-digital type. Unfortunately, this is an endangered species—so you can imagine my thrill whenever I come across anything like it.

My most recent discovery is ecclesiastical type, the one in Eastern orthodox churches. I love the flourishes and the departure from the standard Cyrillic letterforms in these samples below, taken at Hadâmbu Monastery, near Iași, built rather recently.

cyrillic_type_01

cyrillic_type_02

cyrillic_type_03

Ecclesiastical type at Hadâmbu monastery, near Iași. Notice the awkwardness of the ‘F’ and the curious ‘TI’ combination at the end of last word—most likely the personal contribution of the artist.

cyrillic_type_04

cyrillic_type_05

Type found at St. Lazarus Church in Iași.

Great piece of inspiration for a logotype. All you need is a proper Eastern European heritage brand.

When ugly is good

A couple of days ago, I came upon the new identity for the newly formed Symbian Foundation. My first reaction was similar to that of many other designers—which can be summed up to ‘illustrations are OK, but the logo is damn ugly‘. The critique went on to technical details (legibility at small sizes), appropriateness (’would you see that printed on the back of a Nokia phone?‘) and comments on the crappy typography. Further on, obvious resemblance with Juno movie titles and Microsoft’s Hey Genius program was mentioned, and solutions on how to make a better logo in five seconds were offered at no extra cost.

Symbian logo and illustration style

Symbian illustration style

Now that’s what I call a strong reaction! Fortunately, they don’t have something to go back to, as Tropicana has recently done (something with which I don’t agree, but that’s a different story). And I think that a strong commitment is needed to resist such flak from the audience, in order to stay on the initial track (which Tropicana did not).

I hate the logo as aesthetics, but I love what it does, together with the supporting illustrations—it showcases the will to be something totally new. I can only guess the strategy behind it, but I assume that turning Symbian from a closed, corporate-owned operating system with countless incompatible flavors into a open-source, convergent OS takes a lot of guts and commitment. The identity is such a bold move, that I am afraid it won’t be supported enough by the organization, if the idea is just a creative solution from an agency.

It might also be not-so-different in the open-source community, where the most recognized icons are amateurishly drawn characters, as Michael Mace points out:

Nevertheless, it’s a welcome departure from glossy, 3D or hi-tech designs. The whole magic resides in the courage to go for a totally unexpected, different solution, to break free from past associations with a rigid, corporate-owned OS.

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