Elsewhere in the world of big projects over in the UK, things still aren't going so hot for Wolff Olins' controversial 2012 Olympics logo. According to Brand Republic, the Chartered Institute of Marketing has conducting a survey of advertising and marketing people about the branding, 57% of whom found that it "is not an effective design" and among those there were 30% who "feel strongly that it is ineffective." Granted, these people are in the industry, not members of the general public, so they automatically feel like they're experts on what they're talking about, and, like the reason you sequester juries, they were all undoubtedly highly familiar with all of the uproar last year when the logo was unveiled, so take the beating of an already-injured horse for what it's worth. Still, if you're at Wolff Olins, as well as on the Olympic planning board, you have to be pretty sick of this constant negative press. But don't worry too badly, dear Wolff people. It'll all be over in four years.

Our friend Steven Heller is back on the trail with his latest entry on the NY Times' Campaign Stops blog. This time around, he's talking lapel pins and all the trouble they cause when they aren't worn. And like many of his Campaign Stops entries, he's once again assembled a talented group of designers to come by and submit their interpretations of the lapel pin phenomenon. Our favorite was from painter and illustrator, Ray Bartkus, who figured out the easy way to deal with the debate: simply remove the lapels all together. Brilliant.

Lisa Armstrong over at the Times in the UK has up a great op-ed, "How to Get Dressed: Why Everything is Now Designer." It concerns the trend that everything from the impossibly high-end fashion line to the trash can you buy at Target has a designer's name attached to it. Armstrong acknowledges the trend and offers up some examples, from Roberto Cavalli designing hotels to Prada getting into the cell phone business, and then gets into the meat and potatoes discussion, getting into the psychology of the thing. In her opinion, it's adding another level of comforting branding for the consumer, meaning you buy the item for the label and the subset of that label (the designer), adding an additional layer of satisfaction in believing yourself to be all that much more hip and now a part of whatever lifestyle you think this product will deliver you. But while the idea of the piece seems to be, "dang, you're all a bunch of suckers" Armstrong does end on a positive note:

...But it also means that more of us than ever before are taking an interest in design. And that can only be a good thing.

You might remember from a while back when UnBeige somehow became the premiere online home to all things license plates. We're not sure how it happened or why it happened, but when we get a letter from an executive at the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administration asking if we've seen this NY Times op-ed about license plate legislation by license plate writer Stefan Lonce, we realize that we have a civic duty to let these voices be heard and, as such, we must give this new license plate obsessed readership what they're hungering for. But really, all kidding aside, it's a pretty interesting opinion piece on a subject you probably don't know a ton about and really isn't getting reported on too often. In this case, it's largely about legislators deciding if vanity plates fall under the first amendment and what can be done to maintain their existence without offending anyone. So read it, consider yourself more educated about a new topic, and then impress the hell out of everyone at your next social gathering, resulting in you becoming to the envy of all your peers and more attractive to members the opposite sex. You're welcome.

Yesterday, as you may have heard, marked the launch of The Sunday Times' new redesign and we're liking the look of it thus far. It's part of that same trend of bigger images and smaller columns (to us it seems, at least), but they're doing 100% color now, throughout the paper, which is interesting, and we've always thought that the Times does a pretty bang-up job any time they've felt the itch to change things up. For the whole story, we suggest turning to editor John Witherow's description of all the redesigning they did. Here's a bit about the new type they're using:

And for the first time we have a bespoke typeface for the main news section, called Sunday Times Modern. This is the serif face you will see on the splash, the lead story on the front page of the paper, and on the main news stories inside. The characteristics of this typeface, for the growing numbers of you who are keen students of design and typography, are illustrated on this page. Suffice to say here that we think it is a bolder, fresher headline face than the old Century which served us well for many years.

The Obama campaign has had a weird time with design over the last few days. First was the much-reported bad, wherein his new campaign seal looked a little too similar to the real presidential one, which seemed to rub people the wrong way for being too arrogant and the camp immediately vowed to retire it, with hopes that it won't be spoken about ever again. But on the good side, albeit a super bizarre good side, it was announced that fashion designer Donatella Versace has dedicated her new collection of clothes to the candidate, as well having crafted the whole thing around Obama's dressy-yet-casual look. So you take the good with the bad, some weeks, right? And since we like the guy, here's a bit of that good and/or positively-but-weird part:

Calling the U.S. presidential hopeful "the man of the moment," Donatella Versace dedicated her Spring-Summer 2009 collection presented Saturday evening to Obama, creating a style she said was designed for "a relaxed man who doesn't need to flex muscles to show he has power."

Chatting with reporters in the cool of the garden of her private palazzo in downtown Milan at an after-show dinner party, the designer also had some fashion tips for the campaign trail. "I would get rid of the tie and jazz up the shirt," she said.

Returning to our story from a few days back about a possible law in the UK to go into effect that would ban any form of branding on cigarette packaging, DesignWeek has assembled a panel of advertising, design, and branding folk and asked them their opinions about the possible, yet nearly inconceivable law. Between the lot of them, you get a mixed bag. Half see that it might kind of work, others don't think it'd change much of anything, and a few believe that the government doesn't really know what branding is from the get go, like Jim Prior:

To remove all branding you first have to understand what branding is - which the Department of Health probably doesn't. Sure, you can take away the logos, the colours, the visual devices, the pack shape, the copy style. Then you could standardise the card, the foil and the Cellophane. They'd still be branded. The only way to have no branding for cigarettes is to take away the cigarettes. Whether that's desirable or not is irrelevant because it isn't going to happen. Branded goods have bigger things to worry about than nonsense such as this.

Now that months and months have passed and we're all on to being mad about other things, Wolff Olins is getting ready to roll out its revised 2012 London Olympics logo (you remember the original, right? It made people have seizures). Now, instead of loud, bright, neon colors, they're going with an overlay of the British flag, helping to blend together all of the jagged puzzle pieces. Personally, we never had too much of an opinion on the thing one way or the other, but we are starting to turn more favorable toward it, particularly with this new model.

Elsewhere in the world of Olympics mascot design, Finlo Rohrer has some advice in the BBC News Magazine entitled "How Not to Have an Olympic Mascot Nightmare," which offers advice to the would-be designers and firms getting ready to start pitching ideas for the 2012 Olympics in London in how to survive the whole process. In it, Rohrer lays out some of the many historical woes befallen on both the mascots themselves and the people behind them, while simultaneously offering up pointers like "Avoid Design by Committee" and "Stand Your Ground." Of course, after reading through all of it, we think we could probably offer up a better summary for those looking to get into the competitive Olympic mascot design market: "Whatever you do: Don't."

We now believe that an extra level of hell has been added exclusively for one Mr. Han Meilin, the designer behind the Beijing Olympics mascots. You might recall that last month we were talking about his struggles in trying to create these fuzzy little creatures, and how he he had to go through around half a trillion revisions before he got them approved. Now we learn that a growing number of people in China have started letting superstitions get the better of them and believe that Meilin's Olympic mascots are the fulfiller of horrible prophecies or somehow responsible for the recent natural disasters that have plagued the nation. How's that for a horrible job? Not only are your clients a huge pain to deal with, but now you're getting tangentially blamed for the deaths of thousands of people.