A Totally Objective Ranking of Every UK Local Authority Logo
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The humble local council. Recipient for every half-informed beef of the British busybody, from potholes to bin collections to tree-felling. But they do some more noble tasks, too — providing housing, social care and public services like libraries for millions of people.
These quite disparate functions need a banner under which they can operate, but the brand identity of local councils often isn’t their top priority. Among much chaff, though, there are a few stars (and some really astonishing disappointments).
Each has been ranked using some broad criteria accounting for the adherence to design principles, the originality of the concept, and the technical execution, with nebulous bonus points added or subtracted on a whim, because unlike your local council, this is not a democracy.
Also, I’m not doing Parish/Community Councils because 1) a lot of them don’t have logos, 2) they have a budget of five pence and a bit of string so it wouldn’t be fair, and 3) it would take even longer than this already has.
N.B. If you’re a council or anyone else in need of design or digital comms work, I am a freelancer and available for hire! My portfolio is at robinwilde.me.
Let’s start from the bottom.
403. Allerdale
Wedged into Northwest Cumbria, this is the council containing Workington, Cockermouth and Keswick, and so is somewhat central to the Labour Party’s ongoing psychodrama.
It’s a good introduction to one of the first principles of these rankings, which is that it shouldn’t look like a Windows 95 default desktop background. The odd blue blob in the bottom is clearly meant to be a nice artsy curve, possibly representing the Cumbrian coastline, but it half arses it so badly I think it might actually have been made in Paint.
The only thing I like here is the font choice for the URL, which is basically okay, but clashes so horribly with the main text it still damages the overall experience.
