I have a blog post in the Guardian today about the flood of party logos being registered by political parties since the Senate reform legislation was passed in March. At the upcoming election, all parties will get to have their logo printed on ballots – above the line in the Senate and next to the candidate’s name in the lower house.
The Guardian has included a series of logos alongside my article, below you can see all 31 logos which had been put on notice at the time of the writing. I’ve tried to shrink them down to roughly the size we would expect them to be on the ballot (between 7mm x 7mm and 10mm x 10mm).
You can click on the image to see a larger version.
Which party is the last one on the right second last line?
Looks like a bank logo.
Science Party — http://www.scienceparty.org.au/
Great opportunity for psephologists to gauge voter trends. Introducing logo’s adds an aesthetic level of communication that may sway uncommitted voters toward. Comparing it to the relatively intellectual communication of the written word might be interesting. A real before and after opportunity.
Who is the exclamation mark pls? And is there going to be a brick for the G Lazarus Team?
Oh of course – I just noticed the football!
The exclamation mark is “Online Direct Democracy”.
The Animal Justice Party logo is a perfect example of what I’ve been warning of: fine at A3, useless at 7-10mm x 7-10 mm.
I just realised that, by association, people may think the Pirate Party is some right-wind anti-immigration party. 🙁
I don’t agree that the bullet train logo is “abstract” or “meaningless”, it’s pretty obvious who that is.
Charles: Should have gone with the Jolly Roger!
How on Earth did the “Australian Equality Party” decide not to use an = sign as their logo?
how come the Sex Party just decided to use text instead of a symbol?
I think the issue with some of these logos is that parties may have been forced to choose whether they wanted something distinctive at 7x7mm, or to use consistent branding with their existing logos that they would have plastered all over their party merchandise.
On the one hand, it seems to make little sense to me for a party to use a different logo on the ballot paper to their existing logo. It kind of defeats the purpose of using the logo for ‘brand recognition’. For this reason many parties have arguably been stuck with a logo that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone other than people who are already supporters of that party, but they may at least be trying to ensure they don’t lose any brand recognition they already have. (Not that most of these parties have any real public recognition anyway!)
Parties could choose to go for a logo that works well on the ballot paper, but for it leverage any degree of recognition they may have beyond the ballot paper they’d need to be using that logo everywhere else. For small parties in particular, changing a logo that all of their members may have on their T-shirts and bumper stickers at short notice isn’t really feasible.
For the next election cycle parties will have to think about simpler logos that can work both on a ballot paper and in more general use.
The Pirate Party is probably a good example of the issues with logo choice. They could have, and indeed ran a poll on their Twitter account about whether or not they should, have gone with a Jolly Roger design, but 95% of people don’t know what the Pirate Party is, and doing so would, I would think, just perpetuate what those 95% of people think when they hear of them, that they are simply a joke party, which is serious problem for them. Not to mention the inconsistency with their existing branding.
Theoretically one logo would fit in one column, So how would it work it states like Vic and NSW where the Libs and Nats run joint tickets?
Hey, how come comments aren’t showing up in some of the electorate threads?
Can you be more specific? What do you mean by “aren’t showing up” and which electorates are you referring to?
It’s apparently fixed itself after I made that comment. Must have been a computer issue – essentially all comments in the last 4 hours weren’t showing up in the electorate threads (Deakin, Capricornia and Fairfax FWIW)
Here’s the next fun part about all of these logos – many parties won’t get theirs registered in time for the election.
Logos, as with any other reigstration matters, have to be finalised before the issue of writs for the election. The logos have to be advertised for 30 days before their registration can be finalised.
The writs can be issued up to 10 days after parliament is dissolved, so theoretically could be issued as late as May 21 for the July 2 DD. This means at the very least no more logos (or new parties for that matter) that aren’t already advertised will be registered in time for this election. Depending on how much earlier than May 21 the writs are issued, several of the logo applications may also not make the cut-off since they won’t have been advertised for 30 days.
It’s quite possible only the 22 logo applications advertised before April 11 will indeed be finalised before the writs drop.
Looks to me like quite a few parties have lodged Logos that have been advertised by AEC in newspapers and the date for lodgment of objections is post the expected date for Issue of writs. Will this mean that these parties will be disadvantaged by logo not appearing and do they have anyone to blame but themselves?
How many casual voters will confuse the Citizens Electoral Council logo for the campaign logo that the “Turnbull Coalition Team”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/05/09/malcolm-turnbulls-new-logo-is-missing-one-important-thing/
Not just the Country Liberals and Liberal Democrats which will cause confusion at the polling both…
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