Designs continue to improve and designers have heard my request to diversify away from the animal iconography. A number of designers have now submitted graphics representing office or residential building designs (or abstracts thereof) some of which are very good. We would ask that the designers who have submitted animal icons and building concepts that have been well rated to continue to refine their designs as per our comments.

We would however ask that any new designers entering the contest now (or existing designers submitting new designs) now diversify away from either the animal iconigraphy or the building icon unless you strongly feel that you have a variant on that design which is very strong. I think it is clear that our decision process will involve narrowing down to the best of the animal iconography, narrowing down to the best of the abstract building theme, and then hopefully have at least one other theme to pick a finalist(s) from. Once we have the finalists from each genre we will then make a final decision regarding which genre we want prefer the most and then pick the final winner from that genre.

I think designers are focusing too much on the lion or "lion like" beast iconography similar to one of the logos I referenced in the design description brief as something we liked. The point of that was not to say we wanted something which looked very similar - but it was more to say that it was a good representation of a logo where a symbol could become easily associated with a brand overtime, the colour scheme was simple but effective, and the logo reflected what this institution wanted to say about itself - characteristics such as strength, global presence, etc.

So I like to ask any new designers to focus less on submitting similar animal iconography based designs and be more creative in terms of graphics that are clean and simple but represent what we want to say about the company as per the brief.

That being said there are a couple good options based on animal iconography which have been short listed because they definitely have potential. But we just want some variety and dont want to have to be choosing from among 100 designs based around animal iconography.

Thanks