Dublin City Council logo wrong?

I think it’s easy to mistake the flames on top of the old logo as turret battlements ……probably lack of reasearch by tha graphic designers….RTE did this too for the eurovision logo 94..[img][IMG]http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=eurovision+94&sa=N&tab=wi[IMG][/img]

isn’t the problem now that the dublin logo is indistinguishable from the leinster logo, but then i guess the problem now is that dublin is indistinguishable from leinster. why the flames by the way?

isn’t the problem now that the dublin logo is indistinguishable from the leinster logo

It’s all part of the big plan……Dublin’s sprawling so much…..that one day it will be Leinster.

EL ARCHITINO has had his graphic design firm make up an alternative logo to the pathetic attempt made by dublin city council.

EL ARCHITINO’s design heals wounds during transition between old and new, between passion and apathy.

should anyone wish to purchase a t-shirt with this logo they are available on request from EL ARCHITINO gift shop 43 lower benburbs st.sizes xxs only

think you maybe confusing the Munster arms and the Lenster arms

True tis a Harp that represents Leinster

you are right, i don’t know why i thought the leinster flag was three not burning castles. friday evening, gets you every time.

still, why the fire?

el architino is a genuis.

Every lampost in the city has to be changed now…

Why Graham? Look around at the street furniture – most of it has different versions of the arms depending on what era it is from.

There’s more to Dublin’s coat of arms than three flaming medieval castles: http://www.stjohns.be/campus/Class/Renaissance/coatarms.htm. But does anyone know why the shield is blue (still Dublin’s colour)?

The Great Seal of Dublin long predates the 1607 coat of arms. For an image of the 13th-century (1229?) seal, see http://www.dublincity.ie/dublin/regalia2.html The seal has two faces: one appears to recall the city’s origins, depicting a Viking (?) boat under sail; the other shows a single castle with three watchtowers. (How did the three towers become the Three Castles of Dublin? Is it just a heraldic device that means the same thing?)

The Mansion House website – http://www.askaboutireland.com/ntn/dublincity/mhheraldry.html – says that the origin of the Dublin Coat of Arms is unknown and the meanings of the symbols on it obscure. The most plausible interpretation I have found – http://www.iol.ie/dublincitylibrary/regalia.htm – says: “The City Seal shows the Three Castles as three watchtowers surrounding one of the gates in the medieval City Wall. Dublin is evidently under siege; from the central watchtower two sentries sound the alarm, while on each flanking watchtower stands an archer, poised with a cross-bow. The scene is symbolic of the readiness of the citizens to defend the city, and it was probably not intended to depict any actual event. With the passage of time, the three watchtowers became three separate castles, each one bearing three battlemented towers, as shown in the Coat-of-Arms. The sentries and archers were replaced by flames leaping from the towers on the castles.”

The city logo is a much-simplified form of the coat of arms and has taken on many guises over the years; a C19 version, used on official stationery, is shown on p113 of Peter Pearson’s ‘The Heart of Dublin’. I quite like the current, spacey-floaty logo, which has echoes of the original city image of three towers (which don’t sprout flames). And the new blue is more like the one worn by the Dubs we love!

Incidentally, there is a city flag. Again, according to the city libraries’ website: “The Dublin City Flag, which was adopted for use in 1885, presents a combination of national and civic emblems, with the harp of the Ireland in gold on a green background and the Three Castles of Dublin quartered in white on a blue background nearest the flagpole. It is flown at city Hall and at the Mansion House to mark events of civic important, and at half mast on the death of a serving or former Lord Mayor or Honorary Freeman of Dublin.”

For images of national, provincial and regional civic coats of arms. see http://homepage.tinet.ie/~donnaweb/regional/ This site contains the surprising observation that Henry VIII granted Ireland the Harp as its coat of arms because he didn’t like the Popish connotations of the three-crowned former national coat of arms, now used by Munster!

About the new blue in the logo: it seems it’s the designers’ favourite colour – http://www.creativeinc.ie/htmpages/portfolio/dcc.htm – See also their recent work for Aurium and The Irish Greyhound Board: same blue.

MaxB, the flames may be 400 years old but they are a corruption of the original image on the Great Seal, which is almost 800 years old! No flames back then.

BTW, according to the Office of Chief Herald at the National Library of Ireland – http://www.nli.ie/h_eire.htm – “Triplication of symbols in heraldic art, is merely a convention for the purpose of achieving greater balance on the triangular surface of the shield.” So, as the new city logo design dispenses with the shield, perhaps there should be only one castle, not three? That, too, would be in keeping with the C13 image that started all this.

As one who has dabbled in brand management in the past – one of the worst things you can do is have variations of your logo – if you are changing your old logo make sure you have the ability to dispose of older versions of your image within a month or so – if not rebranding is a waste of time.

That wasn’t feasible because the three burning castles is engraved on lamp-posts, bins and so on and couldn’t be removed, not least for historical reasons.
I think the “not-so-new” logo is snazzy enough. When the Corpo changed its name to City Council, they had to do something to update themselves.
I think it’s gone some way towards helping consign stereotypes of workers with arse cleavage and Ireland’s most lazy employees into the past.

I think the sign on the civic offices is funny – the building had just been completed with ‘Dublin Corporation’ carved in massive stone lettering at the entrance – when they went and changed the name.
Now the DUBLIN C of the original remains with ITY COUNCIL spliced in after!
And the Irish had to be changed as well – a neat job though.
You would have though someone would have thought of this considering the massive cost of cut stone – the name change was probably proposed for years

Limerick Cork and Galway Corpo’s all got name changes on the same day – and I don’t think any of them managed to deface the facades of their HQ’s quite like DCC.