Critique Wall.com

This is an interesting interview with Erik Spiekermann of MetaDesign on DW-World on way he thinks that logo and mascot for the 2006 World Cup are “Just Embarrassing”. He states that the designers are at a “disadvantage from the outset. Everybody wants to own a design for an event as big as this, from the CEO to his wife to a whole chain of people going down. And there are way too many committees and meetings where changes are required by people who don't know what they're doing. In the end, after all the input, the common denominator in this case turned out to be very, very low.”

Most designers have to deal with this in every field of design, be it identity, web, or print. I know that that is a constant battle that I face in my work. We have been hired as experts in design and we need to have the guts to stand up for what we feel is the best thing for the job. Spiekerman says about the problems with the logo:

I think the original design assignment must have been all over the place. With all the things that had to be avoided and then all the things they wanted included, it was impossible to come up with something good. Unless, of course, you were a designer with a strong personality who would basically tell those guys giving the orders to get lost, which the designers in this case didn't. They just took their money and ran.

Read the whole interview for yourself at Deutesche Welle.