I AM amused at the restoration of the SNP logo after its benightment of the last couple of years (Few mourn at symbolic execution, August 28).
I designed the logo in 1962 when scarcely out of childhood, long before Winnie Ewing's Hamilton victory. It was commissioned by William Wolfe for a by-election in West Lothian where he was the SNP candidate. A political visionary with an eye for iconography, he proposed it to the party and a year later it was adopted as a replacement for the lion rampant.
The adoption of a geometric logotype is a bold act for a political organisation, especially a nationalist one, with the swastika a not too distant memory. But the inner logic of the thing was persuasive.
Forbye imagined allusions to saltire, thistle, and clootie dumpling, there was perhaps something irresistible about virile angularity supported on swelling curvature, implying among other things that in this outfit, the mechanistic depended on the organic.
At one end of the scale of application it was devised to be hastily slapped on walls with a furtively loaded brush (the aerosol age had yet to come) and a quick flick of the wrist - no skill required. Try doing that with the lion rampant.
At the other end of the scale, official party publications could promote the sign as a metaphor of its own tidy organisation by incorporating it within text in ways which revealed the logo's careful shaping to look like a letterform - ``the 27th letter of the Scottish alphabet,'' someone said - for the logo was proportioned to blend imperceptibly with the typeface Univers, newly elected by the graphically aware as a model of international progressive modernity.
From a distance, I watched in wonder as the logo acquired in turn notoriety, popularity, and in the penultimate revision, dereliction as a crude rectilinearity was forced on it, recasting it in unmistakably fascist mould.
The cyclops bunny mutant which followed was perhaps a stroke of genius, if not in its design at least in its adoption, as it implies a sense of humour (self-ridicule is a clever weapon in postmodern merchandising, but rare in the armoury of political parties), and for its instrumentality in speeding the removal of a serious gaffe.
As it looks like they're stuck with it in the ``definitive'' form, it might be wise to identify other ways of ringing changes. After all, communicators (since G.B Shaw) don't complain about the inadequacy of the alphabet.
(Sorry this has taken so long to write - I was in Korea when your report was published.)
Julian Gibb,
45 West Graham Street,
Glasgow.
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