UK Local Authority Heraldic Logos (A Totally Objective Ranking)
By: Edward Teather
Tags: Council, UK Politics, Graphic Design, Logo Design, Local Government

Freelance graphic designer Robin Wilde recently published an article on this website ranking the United Kingdom’s local authority logos (all 399 of them!) based on their graphic design. It’s an impressive feat, but I do have a minor gripe: Wilde seems to have it in for heraldry (or “crests” as he consistently refers to them as), and penalises logos in his ranking simply for using them.

When I finally build my clockwork time machine I’m going to go back to the 1800s and intimidate whoever came up with using medieval heraldry for municipal identity work until they stop. — Robin Wilde

That’s quite harsh by any standards, and is a sad misunderstanding of heraldry’s purpose. It may be a “medieval” artform but it was developed to solve a very modern problem: visual identity. While we may not need to be able to spot the chairman of, say, Mendip District Council, in the heat of battle against their cruel overlords at the Somerset County Council, identity is just as important now as it was in the middle ages. Heraldry contains a lot of visual information which represents a person or institution, in a succinct but easily usable format: the blazon, a few lines of mangled Norman French which describes what a coat of arms looks like. How it’s then presented is down to the artist, or today the graphic designer. Institutions which use heraldic logos like to assume a sense of gravitas, importance, and history (even when they haven’t got any), see my article on university logos for some examples of venerable old institutions using heraldry in the modern world.

Wilde has unfairly treated some impressive pieces of graphic design because of his aversion to the use of a coat of arms for governmental purposes. And to right this wrong I have taken all (or at least most) of the heraldic local authority logos and divided them up by design type, and found some interesting trends.

Full Colour Arms

It is unfortunate that I have to start with some of these logos, as they do prove Wilde’s points. Many of these logos are clunky and badly designed, consisting of some decades-old painting vectorised and put against text that doesn’t exactly compliment it. The worst offender would be Blackburn and Darwen, which is using an emblazonment of its arms so florid it would only not look out of place on an 18th century bookplate. The others wander around at different levels of mediocrity, with only the last five standing out as anything particularly special. Leeds, Watford, Dacorum, Ceredigion, and Rutland all show an attention to detail and graphic design ability closer to the full colour university logos I reviewed previously. Leeds has stylishly simplified just enough; Rutland, Dacorum, and Watford have all taken fairly similar routes with bold colours and black outlines. Ceredigion has, as Wilde noted, a very complicated but competent vectorisation which works very effectively. Some of these are truly terrible and perhaps a stereotype of what council logos look like, but that’s by no means the only application of heraldry in council branding, as we shall see…

2. Complicated Simplified Arms

Oxymoron? Probably, but it makes sense. These logos all centre around a simplified coat of arms, generally down to a smooth vector in one or two colours, but which are still quite complex in design. I’ve grouped them roughly into categories. The first line have overdone it, the second are very neat but perhaps have too much flare to be stuck on a wheelie bin, and the third look like Oxford University, or Royal Holloway, but on the whole work well. The final line is where this style really comes into its own, with a selection of beautifully vectorised logos (often let down by their accompanying text) which present all of the symbolism of a coat of arms while retaining the necessary minimalism for a modern logo. The City of London uses its arms everywhere to great success, but I’d say that Manchester has been the best design — on that row. I have sorted Bristol away from the rest because, well, it’s just gorgeous. A slight deviation from its actual arms, but hey, look at it. That’s what you can do with heraldry, you can put it in a circle in two colours and make it look like the Bayeux Tapestry was done for the 21st century.

3. Simple Simplified Arms

As with the universities, simple arms are popular, and don’t they look good? There’s a spread here, from the top row (along with Hampshire and Essex) where the shield has been simplified out of existence but the arms retained (New Forest District Council being the best of these). The final four on the page are my favourite, with Islington and Oxfordshire probably taking the top spots, and a special commendation for the City of York. Both look very modern, the coats of arms alone have a great secondary application as social media icons, and are recognisable on their own without the text. Most of these are good designs though, and proof that heraldry can be simplified into a nice, modern, logo, without becoming just a blob that people associate with the local council. Yes, Belfast looks appalling, as does South Ribble, and Norfolk isn’t that good, but for every terrible logo there’s an Oxfordshire or Islington, a cleanly vectorised Somerset, and York, which even Wilde concedes is “rakish.”

4. Aspects

I imagine that I have missed a great deal of logos here, but I chose a representative sample of the uses of heraldic logos without even the ‘crest’ shape which Wilde disliked so. These retain a part of the symbolism of the arms, and can be connected to the arms when the full achievement is seen carved inevitably on some grand 19th century council building. I prefer to see the whole coat of arms simplified as in category three, but there’s nothing wrong with these. In a way, they actually become ‘correct’ when printed on the high visibility jackets of council employees. The heraldic badge is a smaller device than the shield, which was worn by the retinue of an armigerous knight in the middle ages, showing them to be his people but not bearing his arms. I doubt any of the councils’ graphic designers were thinking of that, however, and most of these are good enough.

Hopefully in showcasing a few of the successful heraldic logos from each category of local authorities, Robin Wilde’s unfair slating of heraldry can be disproven, and the artform’s rightful place in the world of graphic design can be upheld.