Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced recently that Turkey was getting a new brand image. Designed by Saffron Brand Consultants, the new branding for Turkey was created in the hopes of cultivating a more business-oriented view of Turkey. Seeking to add more credibility to Turkey’s growing exportation community, the President as well as the Turkish Exporters Assembly (an organization that represents over 60,000 active Turkish exporters) hope that a new strong brand image will show the world the value of Turkish exported goods and the many potential business and investment opportunity that their country offers.
The new logo for Turkey is stunning. Using a subtle, non-aggressive sans-serif font as its base, the word ‘Turkey’ is portrayed through textures and patterns that reflect Turkey’s heritage and bold cultural roots. Personally, I think that this is a brilliant example of textures being expertly intertwined into a word mark. The logo has a very modern Mediterranean feel that is very eye-catching and appealing.
The logo is often accompanied by the tagline, “Discover the Potential”. According to the new website set up for this new Turkish brand (Turkeydiscoverthepotential.com), the new identity for Turkey is “The visual translation of our invitation to the world to discover the rich diversity our country can offer and the business potential it provides.” Excellent! To further accentuate and bring attention to its new logo, all of the accompanying branding for Turkey was created in turquoise, gold and blue.
The logo looks fantastic. My only issue with the logo is that it doesn’t seem to be very versatile. Think about it for a second. It is a very complex logo of individual patterns and textures. The logo looks great in a medium to large size but can it be scaled down in size? I doubt this logo will look nearly as nice printed in a small size. Likely, the multitude of textures and patterns that are its defining characteristic, will simply meld together into a mess at a smaller size. I don’t know whether the branding developers at Saffron overlooked this fact but it could potentially limit the flexibility and usability of this logo.
So far, there have been a whole slew of mock-ups released sporting the new Turkey branding. Here are some of my favorites that showcase this logos potential. Enjoy!
