JKR

While wary of sullying the Design Gazette with partisan political views, I’ll confess to feeling the Conservatives’ new brand mascot has a whiff of the unctuous salesman about him. This sense was amplified as Cameron took to the podium yesterday, the words coming out of his mouth turning to white noise as I focussed instead on the logo behind him. ‘Cameron Direct’ obviously aims to position him as a ‘straight talking kind of guy’ taking his message to the public. But it sounds and looks like an online insurance company. I hate this seven ways to Tuesday, from its wanna-be Obama modernity to the God-awful typography, via the appropriation of the RAF/Mod target which here invokes all the street cred of Gordon Brown claiming to like the Arctic Monkeys.

But what really irked me was the perceived need for the logo’s very existence – political heavyweights from Lincoln to Thatcher didn’t need little branding devices to let us know they meant it – such transparent spin has the opposite effect from the one intended, signifying the politician’s reliance on a bit of moondust to compensate for lackluster substance. Sometimes the most effective branding is no branding, allowing the product to speak for itself.