International Men’s Day is on November 19.
I know this because for many years on International Women’s Day, the comedian Richard Herring would reply to every snarky tweet wondering – erroneously – why men weren’t given their own day as well. They are – it’s on November 19.
Herring’s annual task became a form of painstaking performance art – could his reasonable fact-checking hold back the tide of spluttering online rage?
I’ve seen something similar play out on my social feeds in the past few weeks.
Time and again, I come across incredulous posts thundering that the UK government spent half a million pounds to move the dot in the GOV UK logo. £500 grand! In this economy!
And time and again, incredibly patient designers wade in to explain that no, this isn’t what happened. I have huge respect for their forbearance. But the tide keeps on coming.
No time for nuance
This story begins in June, when the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which oversees the Government Digital Service (GDS) published new brand guidelines for GOV.UK.
To coincide with the launch of the new app, the GDS worked with M+C Saatchi to refresh the brand, as part of a £532,000 project to modernise GOV.UK and broaden its appeal.
Part of this work involved, yes, moving the dot from the baseline into the middle of the GOV UK name, to underline the fact that it’s more than a website. The design teams also changed up the colour palette, from the previous black and white to a more welcoming blue and teal.
Never one for nuance, the press had a field day.
“Absolutely dotty!” The Daily Mail spluttered. “Government blows over half a million on ‘vanity’ makeover for website which involved moving a full stop.” For The Telegraph, it provided, “The depressing proof that our political class is obsessed with style over substance.”
This reaction was fairly predictable. At a time when public finances are under real pressure, here was a story that fitted neatly into the Venn diagram overlap of wasteful politicians on one side, and post-Jaguar logo lunacy on the other.
But it’s also, of course, nonsense. As Tom May memorably put it in an article on Creative Bloq, “It’s the journalistic equivalent of describing brain surgery as ‘doctor pokes head with stick’.”
And yet, it feels like the case for context and nuance has fallen on deaf ears. There seems to be a constant drip-drip-drop of social media posts decrying the rebrand.
A perfect storm
Most frustratingly, some of these come from people who appear to be professional designers. They must know this wasn’t about moving a dot, and perpetuating this narrative threatens to damage the industry. Anything for the #numbers, eh?
In response, designer Ben Mottershead is one of those who had waded into the debate online. The toxicity, he believes, comes from a combination of misunderstanding, and political point scoring.
“Public confidence in government spending is at an all-time low, while online, being first has overtaken being right,” he says. “That mix creates a perfect storm of reactionary noise, quick opinions, few facts, and even less understanding of what good design actually costs or delivers.
“As an industry, we have to challenge that. When creative investment is questioned, our job isn’t just to defend the work; it’s to demand better discourse around it. Too many ‘hot takes’ ignore basic due diligence in the chase for clicks.”
He is not alone in pointing out that 500k is a tiny percentage of the UK Government’s annual budget.
“It’s 0.0004% – the equivalent of pocket change for a multi-year redesign that improves accessibility, usability, and efficiency across millions of general public interactions. If a corporation carried out a similar piece of work, it’d be lorded over and congratulated.”
GOV UK is not only a design success story – it’s a cornerstone of government services in this country, and envied the world over.
According to YouGov it’s one of the most-recognised digital services in the UK. Since it launched in October 2021, it’s had 14.8 billion visits, and 38.6 billion pageviews. Polling shows that 80% of users are satisfied with their most recent experience – a pretty high mark given the breadth and scale of its services.
“If there’s a failure here, it’s not in the design, it’s in the communication,” Mottershead says. “The government clearly didn’t tell the story of the work, leaving designers once again to fight the corner for an industry that continues to prove its worth but rarely gets the credit.”
Filling the explanation void
This failure to explain the work is frustrating. Designer Matt Eason submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to DSIT, asking to see audience and user research, initial concepts, in-progress designs, and, “any documents, reports or presentations showing the progress of the rebrand, including the GOV.UK logo and wider design language.”
It was rejected, as was his subsequent appeal. Initially he was told it would compromise the “safe space” that ministers and officials need to discuss new ideas. Now, he has been told it would be too expensive to provide the information he wants.
“I think they missed an opportunity at launch to release the thinking and research behind the rebrand,” Eason says.
“As well as being useful across government, where the findings could have been applied to other services, it would have given them some degree of control over the narrative. The information void they left was then inevitably filled by people pushing various viewpoints, based on not much evidence, or in some cases just making stuff up.”
The honourable exception in all this is Kim Grey, a developer on the GOV.UK Design System team who blogs as beeps. They wrote an excellent post explaining the changes, including a clear steer on the strategic problems the new designs are intended to solve:
“To expand the GOV.UK brand to provide flexibility across multiple platforms, such as apps, video, and social media.”
“To tackle the perception among younger generations that GOV.UK looks unfriendly and intimidating, without devaluing the existing trust in the service.”
On the cost, they pointed out the project, “was the full-time salaried efforts of dozens of design, development, and delivery specialists for more than a year. By that metric, it’s actually quite cheap.”
And on the logo, “It might not be obvious from a single side-by-side graphic, but a lot of time went into interrogating what we had and experimenting with what could be added… Just because the destination of that journey was a logo that intentionally looks quite similar to the existing one doesn’t mean that the money was wasted, or that creating something radically different would have been better value for money.”
A fighting chance
It’s a brilliant post. But it begs the question, why didn’t the GDS come out with such a clear and articulate explanation? And why have they frustrated Matt Eason’s attempts to help them reclaim the narrative?
Because there’s something bigger in play here for designers.
At a time when the whole industry is under pressure to explain that design is more than a logo – it’s a strategic tool to solve problems and drive growth – this story is pushing the exact opposite idea into the mainstream.
Sarah Robb, creator of the Brand Strategy Academy and co-author of Rebrand Right, thinks the government made several compounding errors here.
“They could have helped themselves by proactively sharing the problems with the previous identity system that were preventing taxpayers from accessing what they needed,” she says.
“You have to actively dig to discover that the previous identity felt intimidating and unfriendly to younger generations. Joe Public isn’t going to do that digging.”
And we – the media included – need to get better at contextualising design work, Robb argues.
“People fixate on the logo, the front door, and question why £500,000 was spent changing its colour. But they miss the extensive work that has rebuilt the foundations, walls and entire structure of the house.”
Her advice for any organisation about to launch design work is to give proper context, and avoid before-and-after logo graphics.
“Give yourself a fighting chance by explaining why the change was needed – rather than just showing a tiny part of the solution,” Robb says.