El Al logo DISFIGURED

EL-AL 197126 Sep 2006

Hi everyone, I am new here.....

I've discovered this great site thanks to a link from Google which sent me to a discussion in which the El Al logo was mentioned.
I just LOVE the current El Al logo, which was designed by Dan Reisinger 35 years ago, together with the magnificent turquoise livery which I will always bitterly miss! This livery was just incredible: its design looked very harmonious and elegant on each model of El Al's Boeing planes, and its colors were absolutely striking. El Al abandoned it, very sadly, in 1999, in a move that was meant to "modernize" the company image. But obviously, the level of service has not improved enough over the last years and the bad reputation of the airline survived despite the new look of its airplanes...

And now, El Al has started to introduce a "new logo", in order to have a "fresher" image...This "new" logo is just HORRIBLE!!! It is ugly!!!

And actually, it is not a new logo, it is only a disfigurement of the current one. It appears on the El Al website (www.elal.com) and many marketing items, although not yet on the planes.

I cannot understand how a "graphic designer" has been able to butcher in such a blatant way the masterpiece of one of his most talented and famous peers. It is shocking. If, at least, El Al had introduced a totally new logo, based on a new concept...; in such a case I would of course miss the current logo, but at least there would be (maybe) something interesting or beautiful in the new creation. Here, there's neither a new creation nor a new concept; some stupid and arrogant self-proclaimed graphic designer has simply "rearranged" a fantastic 35-year-old logo, destroying its great harmony, its beauty, and its visual impact; the new version is not only unestaetical, it is also barely redeable.

I have shown it to dozens and dozens of friends and acquaintances; each of these persons with no exception said that the new version is not beautiful at all, and many had even difficulty to understand what it was. Indeed, a logo mixing a company name in two different languages and alphabets into one linear symbol is not something that current, but Dan Reisinger had not only the idea of creating such a unified logo, but he managed to make it uniquely beautiful and easily readable.

I'd be highly interested to hear your comments...and if someone has an idea of what could be done to try to convince El Al not to adopt this "new" logo, I would be ready to do anything...

Thanks!

William Berkson26 Sep 2006#

1. Your link doesn't work.
2. It would help if you could post images of the three logos: original, revised and current. [See the posting guideliness for images.]
3. This is part of a series actions where big companies pay huge amounts of money to do miserable revisions of great logos (and yes the original EL AL logo was great) in attempts to be more fashionable or something--the AT&T logo comes to mind.

In discussions of these on other threads designers have said that this is a partly product of dysfunctional corporate decisions by committee. I still don't understand it.

Termopolium27 Sep 2006#

Well, I guess part of the problem is that some corporate people will do anything to put a permanent mark on a company, so that they can say "I'm the one who created the *new* El Al" or whatever. So the boss might want a radical change even when that's not advisable.

Also, remember that brand positioning is often more important than artistic merit (sadly). So sometimes a great logo is replaced by an uglier one just because the new one projects a different image.

hrant27 Sep 2006#

The main thing that really bothers me personally is the backslant on the Hebrew.

> so that they can say “I’m the one

Yup.
That's also a big reason we were given TT superhinting (instead of bitmaps).

hhp

EL-AL 197127 Sep 2006#

"Also, remember that brand positioning is often more important than artistic merit (sadly). So sometimes a great logo is replaced by an uglier one just because the new one projects a different image."

That's absolutely true (and it is exactly what happened at El Al in 1999, and what is happening now again). But when a company has the priviledge of possessing a really nice and well known logo, it is a shame to get rid of it. I wouldn't imagine, for instance, Coca-Cola, Mercedes, BMW or the St.Moritz municipality "modernizing" their respective logos in such a stupid way.

EL-AL 19718 Oct 2006#

"The main thing that really bothers me personally is the backslant on the Hebrew."

What do you mean exactly?

I saw the "new" logo on an El Al poster the other day...and it looks really UGLY and CHEAP, what a shame. It's crazy: each and every letter is now horrible...the "E", the "L" and the "A"; the A was so beautiful...it was designed even before the linear logo: it was part of the previous square logo designed by Otto Treuman in 1962 already.

I still can't believe it.

hrant9 Oct 2006#

The Hebrew is slanting in a direction dictated by another writing system.

hhp

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 18 Apr 2015. original URL