Blue Chi’s

Just saw the new brand identity of Oman on Sangeetha’s Digital Oman. It was launched this evening by the Oman Brand Management Unit (OBMU). The logo was designed by Landor – the same company that produced in the past the logos for Pepsi, Microsoft, FedEx, and many more.

I’m not really sure how feel about the new identity, I am not sure what I was expecting, but I didn’t see this coming. I was not “WOW”ed by it. I’m not used to seeing all these new Oman related logos that do not have any of the colours of the flag.

I think that a brand of a country is not only targeted at people outside the country, but also at people inside the country as it might be a tool used to alter our own perception of our country.

I’m outraged by the fact that there is no website for OBMU or the new brand identity. I was checking the websites of all the horrible Omani newspapers and couldn’t find a single picture of the logo until Sangeetha posted about it. 

What do you guys think of the new logo?

Our recent competition at Republic of Code is about to finish. We received submissions from Sri Lanka, Iran, Jordan, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Czech, the US, and Argentina. It’s funny that we did not receive a single submission from Oman, well, it does make sense that we changed the name of the wesbite after all I guess.

If you are a registered member at Republic of Code please help us select the final winner by voting in the poll. We restricted the ability to vote to member who have been registered for a period of three days or more to stop people from cheating, so if you do not have an existing Republic of Code account then you will not be able to register!

Origin Oman is a campaign run by PEIE that is meant to promote local Omani products and services and to creative awareness of the quality of these local products and services. It is the new version of the old “The Omani Product is Our First Choice” – ( المنتج العماني -اختيارنا الأول ) campaign. PEIE made a student competition to design the logo and Haitham Al Busafi won.

His logo concept was of the word “Omani” in Arabic written as a spiral. His draft was selected by PEIE as the winning logo and then he was taken to Dubai to work with international branding agency Landor to guide him on how to transform his concept into the logo you see above. The logo is an outward growing spiral that tells is meant to resemeble the growth and expansion of Omani products and services. It is nice, simple, and smartly drawn.

The video below was shown at the launch event of the logo earlier this week.

The Origin Oman logo will be used in all qualifying Omani products and services just like the Omani Product logo we see on locally made products.

I think that the best thing about the Origin Oman logo is that it was made by someone Omani.