The BKME and Osoul New Logos

Have you guys seen the knew BKME logo? Its depressing. How can a bank like BKME be so stupid I don’t know. I don’t blame the designer. The designer is crap, I am sure he knows that already. I blame the people at BKME who accepted such tragic work. My god, its a disaster! Firstly, before I start talking about the logo, lets talk about the 4×3 Mega’s on the road where the logo is on. You DO NOT use yellow type on a white background. Its very unreadable. They not only used yellow type on a white background, they used it on their outdoor ads!! If you are driving up to the ad on the street you will not see “Al Awsat” written in yellow until you slam into the ad. Its impossible to read when its in a newspaper yet alone an ad on the street 50 meters away while you are zooming buy in you car at 100km/h. Thats their first mistake. Lets talk about the logo. Is that a pearl? Come on, who was the genius who thought of that? Very creative. I am sure no one ever thought about it before (Note: I am being sarcastic here). Even Gulf Bank uses the pearl for their Dana account. Anyway, whatever, fine, go with the pearl, but at-least be a bit more creative about it. It looks like a shop that sells marbles for kids. Their logo really pisses me off.

You know what the problem is? People think being a designer is easy. People think anyone can be a designer. People think that if they take a course in Adobe Photoshop at some trashy institute in Salmiya they automatically are designers. Thats bullshit. If thats true then what did I do for 4 years at university? Why do designers go get their masters then their PhDs? Taking a course in Photoshop at an institute just means you now know how to use 5% of Photoshops capabilities. Thats all. We spend the first two years of university not being allowed to use any computers in our design work. They teach us that the computer is just a tool, its just a means to get what you have in your head onto paper. Thats all. So they spend the first 2 years teaching us about other tools like drawing, painting, silk screen printing, sculpturing, stencils and tons more stuff. Not only that but as a designer you need to be creative, and have taste, both things which many people lack. Why is GianFranco Ferre designing clothes and you aren’t? Why is Philip Starck designing everything from hotel rooms to sneakers and you aren’t? They got it you don’t, its that simple.

Anyway it doesn’t matter. BKME is the one losing here. The new Osoul logo even has a readability problem. Osoul in arabic can be read as Osoul or Osoud. The reason for that is the L in the end is not shaped correctly. The L could look like an L or a D. It goes both ways. Fine the majority will read it as an L but the fact that it might be read as a D is a problem. Now the logo is out and I am sure Osoul is getting comments about it. It could have been so easy to fix but it wasn’t. Below is just a mockup I did in 2 minutes of what could have been done to avoid this Osoul/Osoud mix up.

Osoul Logo

Osoul Logo Fixed

But anyway this post has become to long so I will stop. Its just very frustrating for me because these bad designers give us all a bad reputation and image. The client needs to be able to trust us and bad designers make this trust harder to form.