Monday, April 24, 2017

Beirut - the old logo resurfaces #flashback

Originally published: 14/9/11
And here it is... I tried looking for this logo with its selling line for month and then eventually found it in my own backyard so to speak. A beautiful logo courtesy of Saatchi&Saatchi back when everything was Hariri-centered (as a matter of fact this was the logo of "the project for reconstruction of downtown Beirut" - not "Solidere" just "the project"). Already one can see the word "moustakbal" (the Future) which was going to be linked to Hariri as well. Actually the selling line reads "an ancient city for the future" (this is not the best creative transposition, just a bit of translation) maybe creatively it would be something like "a city with a heritage towards the future" (much better, thank you).
Apart from Charles Helou bus station where the logo is crammed and distorted and some cement road blocks next to the Virgin store's parking lot, the logo has gone out of circulation completely and the selling line is nowhere to be found.
Actually, for the anecdote, when the ad was playing full blast everywhere and the logo was being bombarded on innocent bystanders, when the first serious rains hit Beirut that year, the drainage systems were all clogged with litter that the roads ended up overflowing with rain water so much that Pierre Sadek did a spin off of the the sentence and transformed it into "gharika" instead of "arika" (which in Arabic only differs by a dot on the first letter of the word). So the slogan read "madina (gh)arika lil moustakbal" (a drowned city for the future).