Inverness logo

[daibhidc]

capriuni recently mentioned her hometown's logo, which reminded me that I keep meaning to do a mini-rant here about what's wrong with our one. Here it is:



That's a heavy lowercase "in" in blue (or different colours reflecting different aspects of the city) followed by "verness" in a lighter font, then in smaller lettering "THE CITY" in thin capitals, "in" the same way as before and "THE HIGHLANDS" in the grey capitals. The weak pun on "in", and its heavy lampshading, isn't what annoys me.

The logo is usually unbalanced by a verb, such as "readinverness" in the library, or "learninverness" on the front of the college. (You can see various versions of this at the official website, in assorted colours.) That doesn't really annoy me either.

Because we're a bilingual city, many places have the logo in Gaelic. The Gaelic version doesn't appear on the website, so here's my "artist's impression"; fonts not exact:



You see? They've lost the pun, but kept the emphasis! What the heck is that about?

Comments

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Um. I've heard (And read) that the worst puns are the best puns.

But In the Highlands is just bad.

Full. Stop.

Because not only does it violate the natural rhythm of English Speech, it just doesn't work in any other language.

Major PublicityFail.

(Also, in the comment thread to my original post, I make a jokey analogy between the Seven Cities of my Region with Seven Characters in a fanfic [though I think "Hollywood RomCom" is a better analogy]. I'll give people time to forget what I've said, and then I may post all the logos of the cities around here, and see if people can guess which cities are coupled with which, based on their logo styles).

[john_amend_all]

What the heck is that about?

Perhaps they worried that if they didn't do the highlighting, people would ask them why the English version had a highlighted word and the Gaelic one didn't. (Having just taken a quick look at Wikipedia it seems to me that for strict accuracy it should be written 'nA', since it corresponds to both 'in' and 'THE').