OF&G :: The Blog

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner in the EU organic logo competition!

And we can breathe something of a sigh of relief (at least we are here at OF&G) that the champ is the designer we considered to be the only real contender.

Here it is:

The winning design for the EU organic logo

The winning design was by German student, Dusan Milenkovic, so congratulations to him. From July 2010 this design will be seen on the packaging of organic products across the EU (there are caveats and grace periods to this, before anyone starts panicking they don’t have theirs sorted yet. Talk to your CO for details).

You can read the announcement press release for yourself here (PDF) and check out how the vote was split between the three designs here, and it demonstrates a scarily large amount of support for the strange hieroglyphic-like entry!

Now all that remains is to ensure everyone knows how and when to put this design to work on their packaging. Our licensees have had details on this on a number of occasions in recent months and we’ll be highlighting the issue again in our next newsletter.

The day is nearly upon us. The day we will discover the one logo to rule them all.

If you’ll excuse the slightly nerdy Lord of the Rings reference, I am, of course, referring to the EU organic logo. The results of the competition held to choose this hotly anticipated item of packaging decoration are due out this week.

That’s not to say we will actually find out this week which of the three shortlisted designs have won, because this is the EU we’re dealing with. But they said we’d find out this week, so we’re cranking up the pressure…

These were the choices for the compulsory EU organic logo

You may recall that the three designs caused something of a debate around Europe as to whether the method of inviting and choosing them was entirely suitable and whether the options selected by the judges for the final vote were really the best they could find.

We had our own concerns as it appeared that the voting website allowed you to cast multiple votes. The normal situation with even the most trivial of online polls is generally to be told “No you naughty little cheat, you can’t vote again” when you attempt to show more support than is fair for one particular option.

In its most basic form this is often enforced by the use of a ‘cookie’ (a little bit of text dropped into a special folder on your computer that tells the website you have already voted). Alternatively it is done by recording the unique Internet Protocol (IP) address of your computer when you vote. Sometimes both, plus other safeguards.

We couldn’t see any such protection on this vote and were able to force sequential numbers for the amount of votes cast out of the page that was loaded once a vote had been made. This worried us. We couldn’t find any relevant cookies on our machines and there was no “Don’t be naughty” message.

So the question was, did whoever put the site together simply fail to create a page that said your latest vote didn’t count because you’d already voted. Or did they just not bother to protect the vote…

Obviously someone must have the answer to this, so we emailed the organisers of the competition at the EU asking the questions posed above and seeking reassurance.

The response was deafening in its silence.

So, no doubt by now, with the poll closed, we have winner. Let’s hope whichever logo it was, the result wasn’t unduly influenced by someone who figured out they could game the vote. And no, we didn’t.

Hopefully we’re utterly wrong about this and doing the organisers of the competition a great disservice. If so though, it would have been nice for them to tell us that.

We’ll let you know which logo was picked as soon as we do!

To say there have been ‘reservations’ regarding the EU competition to design a new Europe-wide, compulsory organic logo might be an understatement.

We’ve expressed our own disappointment with the candidates we’re being asked to vote on*, but now there’s even some criticism from one of the judges who were asked to pick the final contenders; none other than the widely respected Craig Sams, founder of Green & Black’s (among many other successful organic brands), in fact.

Natural Products magazine reports on a letter Mr Sams has written to a German magazine outlining his concerns over the process, which he describes as “aspirational in the extreme” for its approach of only opening the competition to design students.

Craig Sams know a thing or three about branding and spoke on the subject at our Selling Organics: What’s the Story? conference in London, in October. It really is a shame that this process has to be mired in controversy when the sector has enough challenges to face without yet more bureaucratic mishandling to contend with.

And on the subject of voting for a logo, we have some other misgivings about how it’s being done. But more on that soon…

* Reference to our ‘disappointment’ is made with due respect to the so far anonymous designers whose entries made it to the shortlist of three. They’ve done very well to make it this far and have demonstrated great creativity, but it’s not their fault that what was really needed was a researched, tested and professional identifier that has to sit alongside some very expensive and carefully considered branding.

Just as an addendum to the last post; the Facebook page for the EU organic logo competition, containing just some examples of the entries, makes for interesting viewing.

It’s only a tiny fraction of the 3400 or so total hopefuls, but it at least gives some insight into some of the options we’re not being given the chance to vote on.

Today we see an interesting take on the EU organic logo vote, with one German lawyer suggesting that people vote ‘no’ by emailing the Commission.

A ‘no’ option has not been made available on the voting page – you have to choose one of the shortlisted options. Quoted in a piece on the Organic-Market.info website, the lawyer in question, Hans-Peter Schmidt, raises some interesting concerns about the choices and the process that led to them.

At the time of writing there have been just short of 30,000 votes on the official website.

Will you be voting? Or even voting ‘no’?