About a month ago, our Editor-in-Chief Giuseppe Russo, shared his critical design opinion about the new City of Cape Town logo in this post. We got a great amount of feedback and following that post, there has since been ongoing controversy and press on the topic. Basically, people feel that the logo was not crafted into a visually strong identity.

Image: Now Boarding

Image: Now Boarding

Most recently, Now Boarding, one of Cape Town’s smaller advertising agencies, came up with a clever plan. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of complaints, they decided to put forward their own design for the City of Cape Town logo, as they feel the public deserves to see more options. The team was headed up by Lead Designer Marco de Sousa, Creative Director Michel Brink and Executive Director Jacques Oberholzer. Here’s what they came up with:

Image: Now Boarding

Image: Now Boarding

Michel Brink from Now Boarding explains that the logo can be broken up into eight parts, each illustrating one of the eight districts of Cape Town. This thinking encourages Capetonians to take pride and ownership in their immediate community. And these eight districts of proud citizens come together to create one city:

Image: Now Boarding

Image: Now Boarding

Image: Now Boarding

Image: Now Boarding

Now Boarding has sent the suggested logo out into the cyber sphere, looking to generate healthy debate around the topic. So far, feedback and critiques include the fact that some inspiration has been taken from the City of Melbourne logo, which looks like this:

Image: behance.net/gallery/City-of-Melbourne/276451

Image: behance.net/gallery/City-of-Melbourne/276451

Regardless of the critiques, this is just a conceptual work, right? So what’s the point? Michel explains that the best case scenario for the agency is that the government and the ‘powers’ will start taking notice of Cape Town’s smaller agencies like Now Boarding, most of which would jump at the chance to rebrand the city, at a fraction of the cost.

So what’s your opinion? Which logo do you prefer? The old or new one? Comment below or Tweet us @onesmallseedSA here.

Image: Now Boarding

Image: Now Boarding