In 2012, the State Library of Queensland (a beautiful library; I can attest to this personally) underwent a major rebranding. The rebranding process was extremely collaborative, working with a large internal brand team, bringing in the opinions all SLQ staff through workshops, and conversations with external stakeholders (source PDF). Out of these conversations came the tagline “All Yours”. The design team worked on the logo/wordmark, stylizing the Q and making it the most important aspect, “the Q is the largest, all-encompassing component of the mark – signifying that Queensland is everything to us and SLQ is at the heart of the Queensland community” (source). The pointing/talk-bubble nature of the logo visually leads into a variety of uses.
Below, two different services/websites in the SLQ suite using the logo to ‘point’ at the name.
A graphic advertising a specific award (source)
A video tour of the library, showing the ‘All Yours’ tagline
If the logo suffers, it would be because it looks like one more speech bubble in a sea of speech bubble logos (including this fellow Aussie). In this use, with the letter Q becoming the speech bubble, it is an integral part of the design, rather than an add-on, like most of the other designs. One other criticism I have is that the Q bubble, to an outsider, may not even look like a Q – rendering the logo looking like an SL in a speech bubble. Perhaps the ‘Q-ness’ of the logo could have been emphasized further. Nonetheless, this new logo and branding is a distinct improvement over the plain wordmark in use before, and has been used quite effectively in the overall design.
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