BY Christian Palino

Viva La Rebrand

So the word is that France — home to the revolution, notable poets, an even more notable short emperor, lots of cheese, the largest erector set achievement the world’s ever seen, and the world’s hottest, recently-ex-italian first lady — hosted 82 million visitors last year who aren’t spending enough euros to make the country No. 1 in tourism revenue. Enter the France rebrand.

I can’t say I recall having seen the previous version of the France tourism logo in the wild. The graphic concept had potential but it suffered a rather lackluster execution, especially in the integration of the typography. And while the intent of the new logo to symbolize Marianne in an energetic illustration in the french color palette (and at least that of 29 other sovereign-states) is moderately interesting, it suffers from a similar deficiency in execution. The line work is neither loose enough to retain energy nor standardized enough to coalesce the diverse elements. One of those elements is the typographic treatment, which while appropriately informal and playful in the tag-line “Rendez vous en france”, is overworked and over-manipulated in “france”. A previous version of the new logo (shown below), released in June of 2008, had more breast definition and was deemed too risqué — though maybe being excessively something would have been better than excessively nothing.

Previous version of the new logo… NSFW? You decide!

\n\nSo the word is that France — home to the revolution, notable poets, an even more notable short emperor, lots of cheese, the largest erector set achievement the world's ever seen, and the world's hottest, recently-ex-italian first lady — hosted 82 million visitors last year who aren't spending enough euros to make the country No. 1 in tourism revenue. Enter the France rebrand.