Zara Nicholson
Metro Writer
THE designer behind the controversial proposed city logo firmly believes it is a “beautiful logo which has the potential to become iconic”.
Marios Flourentzou, creative director at Yellowwood Future Architects, spent three weeks on the design that has split public opinion.
The design “tried to capture the diversity of Cape Town but with a fresh look”, using a new colour scheme, he said.
The council votes today on whether to adopt the logo.
Flourentzou said the company followed a “rigorous” process of research and conceptualising the city’s intent and vision. “When we embark on a process like this we do a thorough analysis, looking at global best practices.
The key to our investigation was whether to use the national flag colours and our research showed that mostly sporting or national organisations used those colours, which was overdone.
“So we alluded to the colours of the national flag but made it more Cape Town as we are a diverse city.” .
“We knew we had to retain Table Mountain,” Flourentzou added, “but we wanted to add more meaning and made Table Mountain more abstract. We took the mountain from different angles to give the layers, which speaks to different horizons and progress which the city wants to achieve.”
David Blyth, Yellowwood managing director, said: “The logo celebrates Cape Town with a very positive mark, it’s very unique which is an important thing to capture and reflects the diversity of the people, and talks to being inclusive and progressive.”
It had to be “fresh”, he said. “Most comments are very subjective and people are criticising the logo instead of the intent of the logo… it’s just unfortunate that they are not informed about the meaning behind it.”
Flourentzou graduated from the University of Pretoria with a degree in information design and has 18 years industry experience.
He said: “Change is always difficult to grasp. I know how much the current logo is loved… But my hope is that we move forward and embrace it. I believe it is a beautiful logo and that is has the potential to become iconic.”
zara.nicholson@inl.co.za