Identity Crisis?
At the beginning of August, The Greater London Authority and the Mayor of London announced the start of a pitch process to create a new brand for London. Yesterday marked the deadline for entries and numerous agencies from around the world delivered their initial concepts to City Hall in the capital for the first round of judging.
However, over the past week, the industry has been awash with criticism directed at the GLA for the fact that the first stage of the pitch process is unpaid. Naturally, the arguments against free pitching flared, with most high profile of all, Lambie-Nairn announcing it was boycotting the process due to the lack of budget and lack of creative direction from the GLA. A spokeswoman from the agency told Design Week ‘There must be hundreds of consultancies spending money doing creative on this, and yet you cannot even talk to anyone at the client end about the brief’.
Surely as designers- particularly if living in London, the opportunity to create such an exciting, potentially world-famous identity for the city in which we live is the kind of one that shouldn’t be passed by, regardless of cost. As designers, we’re always thinking, always looking out for chances to solve problems and one such as this is surely no exception. Do we not all have an inbuilt desire to answer this brief?
Laura Haynes from design agency Appetite, which branded the GLA told Design Week ‘It is interesting that there are people in the industry willing to say, “Let’s do this”, but, quite frankly, we are very busy professionals and consider this tender disrespectful to London.’ To me, the fact that people in the industry are willing to do it shows guts and confidence and commitment to the potential chance to create the solution.
Perhaps if the whole process been billed more as a competition rather than a free pitch, the backlash may have been smaller. In effect, this is a competition- any agency in the world against each other- jobs don’t really get more high-profile and competitive than that, and surely that should drive agencies around the world and especially in London, to deliver the goods?
One agency which took the bull by the horns and openly admitted its plan to get involved was Moving Brands. Not only did they announce their plan to enter the competition but they decided to publish every part of their thinking and design development online, to create an open and honest design process. This would avoid the type of comments that were received after the 2012 identity launch, as well as give their agency massive publicity.
They achieved over 40,000 visitors to their blog and more than 500 followers on Twitter. Their process was featured in both the London press and the Design press and they published their entire entry online. Surely this kind of innovative attitude will only create more business opportunities and raise the profile of the agency far beyond that of agencies who refused to pitch?
