Liverpool has been running a competition to find the best poems celebrating the city’s Capital of Culture year in 2008, with the winner set to be announced this week
Funded by DaDa Disability and Deaf Arts and supported by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Cllr Steve Rotheram, there are two categories: under- and over-18s.
I’ve been reading through the entreis and thought I’d flag them up, as they’re a good mix of the reverential, celebratory and amusing.
There’s some fascinating stuff over at How Do regarding the conception of the new logo, which has been given a rather mixed reception.
Since my media nodes, and time, are naturally limited I failed to get any sort of inside scoop, but How Do reports a number of interesting factoids, including:
• Finch was originally to be awarded the pitch without it being put out to tender, resulting in some understandable consternation from other agencies in the region
• A second pitching stage saw three agencies bidding for the roll-out of the branding and launch, using the logo already designed by Finch
• An original strapline reading ‘Alive with Imagination’ was removed when it met with ‘a pretty poor reception from everyone unfortunate enough to have seen it’
• A number of companies competed for various components of the brief, which seems bafflingly complicated
• Phil Redmond has had nothing to do with the branding. He is apparently in a huff after disagreeing with the direction of the branding
“So, we need a logo that mixes the old with the new, the vibrant with the classical, old architecture versus the new architecture. The Beatles AND The Wombats, The Cavern AND Cream, Protestant AND Catholic, Liverpool AND Everton, Yosser Hughes AND Danielle Lloyd, Yin AND Yang, forward not backward, blue and, er, light blue.”
“And we need to have some horrible tower blocks in it for, y’know, business and shit.”
“How about a two-tone pictures of some cool Liverpool landmarks, plus those shit tower blocks?”
“Wouldn’t that look like the Thames TV logo?”
“Yes. But lets get some slebs in to tell us what they think of it. Say Abby from The Zutons, that bloke from Cream, some woman who owns a boutique and the director of the school for Tropical Medicine.”
“What have they got to do with it?”
“Absolutely nothing, but we’ll call them brand ambassadors and say they form a wide cross-section of Liverpool society.”
“Love it! OK, I’ll send this down to design. By the way, how much are we going to charge for this?”
“Oooh. 50 grand? Plus £20K for research. There’s a recession on after all…”
There’s a bit of a puff piece on Korova in The Guardian today that hits the nail on the head about Korova in that it ignored the jingly-jangly stoned cosmic scouse thing that was all the rage in Liverpool a few years ago,