What if Leeds . . . had style!

Call me shallow - I totally admit it, I’m about as deep as a cross section of Happy Shopper cling film - but I appreciate a well designed, thoughtful, attractive logo. If it’s only the local takeaway or self-employed dog-sitter even I’ve been known to get a bit sniffy if the marketing is on the dodgy side. Once I even turned down a rather lucrative piece of work owing to the fact that the business in question insisted on corresponding with me in Papyrus font on some hideously gauche stationery. Which quite possibly makes me a typography snob too, and quite possibly in a minority of one. If the logo represents something as important as the vision for a city, which is a pretty deep and difficult concept, I think I’m justified in expecting something quite eye-catching, powerful, remarkable even. And if that city happens to be Leeds then I want a logo that expresses all the passion, pluck, gumption and grit that I feel makes the place great. . . Obviously that’s a tough brief and I’m the first to admit I wouldn’t fancy being the one to design it, but that’s why I’m not a pixel magician. So, let’s see, What If Leeds . . .

Forget for a moment that there’s only seven words and four separate font effects clamouring for attention, what concerns me is that owl . . . I’ve just had to slap myself smartly with a cold damp flannel as whenever I think about that owl my mind goes into an overdrive of obscenity, a growling bitter diatribe consisting mainly of guttural word shards of a mainly Anglo-Saxon origin. Owl/Leeds . . . it’s a fairly lame and uninspired choice of mascot. If it must be an owl then at least one of the glorious golden ones on the Civic Hall, or any of the lovely bunch on the Leeds Owl Trail. We’re hardly short of magnificent, impressive, fabulous beasts in Leeds (though why we can’t have the Leeds Town Hall Lions as our logo I’ll never know . . . there’s nothing quite like those four striking fellows any where else, they are pure Leeds.) Quite why this jejune, inept bit of clip art is thought to represent me and my city is beyond me . . . if they told me it was the logo for a small nursery in Moortown, even that would be far too lazy for words.

Actually, style isn’t as superficial as I made out. Style is the way we do things, the surplus of delight beyond the strictly necessary, the swagger in the step and the spice in the sauce, and it’s the style of a place that makes you want to be part of it, not the plain facts and certainly not the bare statistics. Style should come across in everything we do as a city. Nobody in their right minds could call that owl stylish. Clip art never caused a heart to beat faster or created a sense of passionate identification with a particular place. What if Leeds had a sense of style . . . Let’s get rid of the owl.

16 August 2010
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What if Leeds . . . had style!

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