Every once in a great while we find ourselves in agreement with France.

FRANCE COMPLAINS OVER EU BIRTHDAY LOGO

October 11, 2006 (EUobserver) - France has sent an official complaint to the European Commission over the EU's 50th birthday logo to be used next year, suggesting that it fails to symbolize European unity as it looks different in every language.

The move comes after a jury representing EU institutions and member states last month chose an image created by a Polish art student stating colourful letters "Together since 1957", from around 1700 submissions to the contest.

The winner was Szymon Skrzypczak, a 23 year-old art student from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. Mr. Skrzypczak's design is a typographic hash, originally set only in English. It had to be redesigned for each of the 20 official EU languages.*

A logo is a distillate of something larger. A well designed logo is uniform and recognizable in its variety of placements, not unduly complicated, highly retainable, and expressive across language and cultural barriers.

The EU b-day logo amazingly possesses not one of these basic qualities. Too many letterforms, too many colors, too many logos. Nor is it graphically or semiotically clever. Its realization of the "In varietate concordia" theme is at once both trite and confusing.

None of the top ten submissions are any more inspired or inspiring, but most have the virtue of a single instance.

ACTUALLY, IT'S MORE A CASE OF
EUROPE FALLING APART IN 2006
[Headline Appears Below A Graphic
Of The "Together Since 1957" Logo]

PARIS November 10, 2006 (Times Online) - [The French] objections come after a shower of rude comment throughout Europe about the logo, which was chosen at a cost of €200,000 (£134,000 [USD $266,641.27]) last month by a jury of experts from EU institutions and member states. ... A common gibe on the internet is that the jumbled letters evoke a ransom note more than festive celebration of the 1957 Treaty of Rome.

In a letter to José Manuel Barroso, President of the EU Commission, Catherine Colonna, the French Minister for Europe, said:

"The logo creates a problem. The message of European unity is not there because each logo is different."

She was referring to plans for each country to produce a version in its own language. The Commission announced national versions after an initial outcry about the original, which was only in English,** a language that President Chirac has banned French officials from using.

And it is here that our agreement ends. The critiques offered up by the French press are the usual hash of chauvinism, anti-mondialisation, and Anglophonophobia.

French anger went public last week when Barbara Cassin, a philosopher, wrote in Le Monde that the slogan had got everything wrong. "It is absolutely counter-productive and counter to the way that Europe wants to define itself."

She was upset that the logo was in English and it looked like an inferior version of the logo for Google, the internet search website. She hated the playful R (registered in a circle) which made the Union look like a commercial product. French voters last year rejected the European Constitution in a referendum largely because the Union is seen as an Anglo-Saxon commercial venture.

And this:

Some commentators also complained that the EU institutions only use the English version of the logo on their websites, with an association for defending the French language criticising the commission for generally using English in most of its posters in Brussels buildings.

And the usual bureaucratic snits:

The Finnish EU presidency is annoyed with the fact that it was not at any time consulted by Brussels over the emblem - despite several requests to be involved.

... One EU diplomat said about the anniversary logo chaos "It is a flop, a catastrophe. It shows what happens when countries are not consulted and the commission goes its own way" - despite member states having been represented in the jury by a high official of the EU council [member states' secretariat.]

We think it enough to say we don't like it and leave it at that.

* Actually only 19 redesigns as the Spanish and Poruguese are identical. Downloads of all the settings are available here (scroll down). Bulgarian, Romanian, and Gaelic (Irish) settings are included, though these will not be official languages of the EU till 01.01.07. Greek, an official language, has no setting.

** Still the most widely used variant.

PFFT (What is this?): BG - Хаос / CS, DA, NL, EN, FI, FR, DE, PL, SK, SV - Chaos / EL - Χάος / ET, MT - Kaos / HU - Khaosz / IT, PT, ES - Caos / LV - Haoss / LT - Chaosas / RO - Haos... 5 | Rayonnement français 2½