Being from, and currently residing in Montreal leads to me having a bit of a personal attachment to the city. So when I heard about Montreal getting a new visual identify, I was quite pleased. When I finally found the new logo, I was a more than a little disappointed, specially seeing as I'm one of the tax payers who contributed to it's close to half million dollar price tag.
Granted, the logo isn't for the city of Montreal itself, but for the Greater Montreal Area, which the creators explain is made up of "five large entities", listing them as Montreal, Laval, Longueuil, and the North and South Shores. This would explain why the 'M' in the new logo is split into five. One problem though. Longueuil is a city (albeit a big one) located on Montreal's South Shore, which is made up of a great deal of other cities, and covers a ton of space, much of it empty. It isn't so much of an entity, as it is a geological reference that they labeled here in an attempt to be inclusive, and to help divide their 'M' properly.
The colours they use for the main version, which I've included above, are down right ugly as far as I'm concerned. According to the site they have devoted to this branding effort, through the colours "systematic use in communications, they will provide the brand with its unique character and facilitate its recognition. " I looked around but couldn't find any explanation towards why these are the official colours, which must have been picked for a reason, one would hope. To me it looks like they picked them out of a hat. I'm assuming they wanted to use high contrast in an attempt to show the diversity of the combined areas and the peoples within them, but I find it hard to believe they couldn't have picked more aesthetically pleasing colours than these.
It already seems dated , and they haven't even started to implement it yet. This is supposed to be used to market Greater Montreal on the world stage. To me they've reverted to Expo '67 by creating a logo that might have been used by the then great exposition. Sadly that was over 40 years ago. It was a great time for this city though, and maybe they are just trying to remember or relive those days before the horrors that were the Olympics found their way here.On a more positive note however, are the variations they have of this logo, which they at least realize is very customizable, and hopefully always will be, so we can avoid the catastrophe of the official version.
The question remains how much of this logo we're actually going to see, considering all current city logos will be kept in place, while this seems to be more for international marketing. Personally I think if you're going to take the leap here, why not rebrand all the cities themselves? Apart from implimentation costs, it could be a big step in bringing together Greater Montreal, perhaps having each area using a single colour version.
All in all, it seems like a good idea that's managed to go wrong.
