$6,000, that's the bar raised by the Mister Wong's execs team to award the winner who will submit the best new logo for their company. That's motivating enough to spend a few hours drawing who we think Mister Wong is.
Why is Mashable defining this event as a twist? Let's take it back a few weeks ago. On July 2nd 2007, Mister Wong launches its social bookmarking service in the United States. When the news hit Mashable, an aversion of negative feedbacks swamped the comments box. Groups of American Internauts interpreted the logo as a racist offense, mostly since Mister Wong is a German company, not a Chinese one.
At first fuzzled by this type of response, Kai Tietjen, Ceo of Mister Wong, buried the logo in the basement and expressed his sincere apologies. The twist Mashable talked about? Instead of shying away and let time erase the memories, Kai Tietjen stepped in the spotlights and launched an international online contest, with dollar bills for the winner.
The winner will be rewarded upon its ability to provide the best logo possible for the Mister Wong social bookmarking service. And here is the first trick for graphic designers to overcome: Find a logo that suits the Wong identity, all-the-while avoiding to use racist stereotypes.
Now this is tricky since the line between acceptable racist stereotypes and unacceptable ones is very thin (and subject to changes). Especially since the company is German: If there's one crowd we don't like to see juggling with race stereotypes, it surely is the Germans! Before being a good graphic designer, the winner will have to be a smart cookie.
The business behind social bookmarking
On another level, social bookmarking Websites are exploding in the Web 2.0 wave. The growth even surprised Jay Adelson, who never thought before launching Digg that the phenomenon would turn this big.
Robert Scoble recently explained why he thought that socially-driven technology was going to beat more traditional ones (Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years). Social bookmarking appears to be one of the most powerful 2.0 tools.
In a few years, Mister Wong's execs will have their hands on some pretty heavy business deals (except if the new logo fails them again). The graphic identity has to fit this context too.
Submitted logo
Title: MW double 0
Description: The M and the W form a cool alien-like face with a simple 3-D shape.
The hat is the crown of the "Master Of Bookmarks" (+ kinda looks like ancient times chinese hats).
The shape actually forms two zeros attached to each other (00), 2.0.
The design is simple and does not imply more than 5 colors.
Cool 2.0 logo (actually the only one with 2 0s), respects the company's identity, unique, fun.
Comment my work here.
