EU Organic Logo

In April of last year, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development announced a competition — open only to design and art students from the 27 EU Member States — that Offers a prize, that money just can’t buy” according to the press release, “The winning logo will be introduced as the official logo for organic products throughout the European Union in July 2010.”

In charge of filtering the first round of submissions was a panel of judges that included a combination of designers like Erik Spiekermann, Rita Brusila-Räsänen, Szymon Skrzypczak, and Elisabeth Mercier, and non-designers from the organic industry like Urs Niggli and Tom Václavík, all of them overseen by Rob Vermeulen, former president of the Pan-European Brand Design Association. And the whole thing came with all the typical fine print of a design contest that tends to ruffle so many feathers. Altough, 3,422 entries were submitted (you can see various of them here)

Of those, the jury selected 100 logos to advance to the next round, for which all designers received a certificate. The jury then selected the top ten, then the top three and, finally, those three were put to a public vote for the final selection. Below is the final score of the competition. The winner is the Euro-leaf idea of the German student Dusan Milenkovic. The student gained 63% of the overall vote for his “Euro Leaf” logo. The icon shows the EU stars in the shape of a leaf against a green background and is meant to convey two messages: “Nature and Europe“

-As usual- Not everyone was thrilled with the contest, or the three logos they had to choose from. For example Organic associationBioform issued a statement by directorLeen Laenens, supposedly representing “many” in the industry, that read in part “they(the three proposals)have no visible link with the sector. One could ask the question whether the consumer is aware the an organic product is involved“.

Source