Last month, New Yorkers heavily criticized the new logo design of New York City Taxicab. Wanting to enhance the taxi’s functionality, comfort, and safety, the taxi commission believes a new logo design can capture the essence of its branding initiatives. It will also help tourists avoid those unregulated gypsy cabs.

However, it failed miserably to meet the expectations of many overtly critical New Yorkers and even prompted The New York Times to run a week-long discussion just to bash this design disaster. Among hundreds of negative reactions coming from design experts and the general public, I find the comment of designer Sam Potts very striking:

“To have the ‘NYC’ touch is, to me, poor craftsmanship, especially with such a blocky typeface. Additionally, as this goes whizzing by, clumped-together letters just get clumpier.

“Having said that, my first reaction to this was, ‘There’s a logo for the taxis?’ In fact, the logo is a secondary element in the branding of the taxis — I imagine very few notice the logo but everyone knows what the yellow signifies. I’d even say that the Crown Vic is a more powerful brand identifier (in the parlance) than whatever logo they had or adopted.”

NY Times’ blog City Room even invited readers to show their own version and much to my surprised, offered better versions such as this photo below:

Then again, I must not be surprised for this sloppy design was a product of Wolff Olins, the same company behind that utterly terrible London 2012 Olympics logo!

Via If it’s Hip, It’s Here

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:25 am and is filed under Logo Design News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.