Emdashes. Modern Times Between the Lines.

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule
Before it moved to The New Yorker:
Ask the Librarians archive

About Emdashes | Email us

Features & Columns:
Headline Shooter
On the Spot
Looked Into

Letters & Challenges
Sempé Fi: Cover Art

Seal Barks
Eustace Google

X-Rea: Rea Irvin Type
The Squib Report
In Memoriam
Personal

The BP Logo, Redesigned With Attitude

Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: BP, Canada, contests, design, environment, Greenpeace UK, Gulf, oil spill, poetry, Stevie Smith

Emily Gordon writes:

Remember the contest Greenpeace UK announced to redesign the BP logo? Our own cartoonist Pollux beat them to it, of course, but now that the official contest is closed, you’ll want to go look at the entries. From the Greenpeace UK Flickr page:

BP claim that they are ‘beyond petroleum’. But this is a company that is up to its neck in the dirtiest oil going - poised to invest in the Canadian tar sands, and causing environmental catastrophe through deepwater drilling.

Their nice green logo doesn’t really seem to fit them too well, so we ran a competition to find a logo that we could use to rebrand BP.

The results are displayed here.

Some of the entries are pretty good, especially the ones that depart from the green-and-yellow starburst motif and try something more conceptually daring, like the droplet surrounding an oil-covered hand (“not waving but drowning,” as the Stevie Smith poem goes) and the tagline “be patient.”

Or this designer’s clever and poignant approach—a repetition of BP’s logo and the text, “I still love your logo,” then a note in small type below: “I wish your oil rigs were designed as well as your brand identity.”

0 comments

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

Your name

Your email address

Your website address

Remember personal info?

Your comments

About us

Hello! We're a small band of culture writers, editors, and artists based in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Emdashes, which spent its formative years as a New Yorker blog, is our collection of conversations—mostly civilized—about magazines, movies, design, punctuation, and other things that stir us.

Want to know more about the people who contribute to Emdashes, and the secret meanings behind our column titles? All about us.

We welcome tips, questions, comments, and corrections, and are always on the lookout for ardent, obsessive contributors. Click here to email us.

We host occasional book giveaways. Publishers, please email us for our postal address.

Our favorite things | Compliments and press

Looking for The New Yorker magazine? Kudos on your classy taste. Here's how to contact The New Yorker.

Tell me more

Dashes, some say, “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like an em dash itself—provides a thoughtful pause amid the hubbub.

Emdashes, founded in 2004, is written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. All posts before October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.

The site was designed by House of Pretty with illustrations by Jesse R. Ewing.

Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (author of our web comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The Emdashes pencil logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.

Other writing by Emily Gordon

Reviews: theater writing (for Time Out Chicago)
Profile: Valerie Casey, Designers Accord founder, is spearheading the design of sustainability (for SXSW World)
Feature: Rea Irvin: visionary art director, bon vivant, New Yorker founding father (for Print)
Slide show: the Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for NYCgo.com)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Homage: Celebrating lindy-hop legend Frankie Manning (for NYCgo.com)
Inquiry: Does a New Republic redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Interviews: four up-and-coming designers under 30 (for Print)
Profile: novelist and dance critic Laura Jacobs (for Newsday)