Silk Road Typography

European Union's 50th anniversary logo, design by Szymon Skrzypczak, 2006

Late at night, after seeing a particularly vapid, unlikely or just plain idiotic television commercial, I'll often turn to my wife and say, "Can you imagine being in the meeting where that idea was presented?"

I've taken part in a few such meetings myself, especially during a ten-year stint working in advertising. Often a bad idea is made worse in such gatherings, as people attempt to improve on a concept by adding their own needs and biases, layer-upon-layer, until everyone is happy. But such committee solutions cannot overcome the fact that if the original idea is weak, the result is merely a weak idea with everyone's name on it.

Occasionally, the same thing happens in design meetings, especially with logos that, for whatever reason, must represent multiple nationalities, disciplines or facets of an organization...

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