This week, on June 28, a new logo was presented that will market Region Stuttgart, consisting of Germany's sixth-largest city and the municipalities around it, an area with about 2,7 million inhabitants. It was created by the Hamburg-based agency
Mutabor.
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| The rejected 2010 logo. |
There was an attempt to introduce a new tourism logo for Region Stuttgart last year. It consisted of several colourful lines that made up a star inspired by the shape of the region and was created by the Berlin agency Embassy. After it was revealed in July 2010, it faced
heavy criticism from the local design community, the logo was withdrawn and a new one was commissioned.
Perhaps influenced by the failure of the last logo, this new one is very much a "dialogue logo", as if it was selected to tell critics that their complaints had been listened to. The symbol is in fact referred to as the "dialogue S". Taking inspiration from the first letter in Stuttgart, the mark consists of two speech bubbles, perhaps one responding to the other. One can also see a reference to German quotation marks. Included in the logo is the tagline "Spricht für sich", which means "Speaks for itself", expressing confidence.
Although the example shown above is yellow, the new logo can also be light blue, orange, green or purple. On German brand design blogs like
Design Tagebuch and
Designlovr you can see several examples of identity application that show the versatility of the new logo.
The logo was selected through a tender involving 200 agencies, of which 10 were selected to pitch. The jury included people who had critised the previous logo.
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