Mauritius tourism sucks?

[Frank Cox]

work_sus_island.png

Here is the new logo for Mauritius tourism.

Too bad Sus means "sucks" in Mauritian Creole....

Makes you wonder who approved that.

[Randy Stankey]

That sounds like the old myth about how General Motors tried to sell their Chevy Nova in Mexico without realizing that "no va" can be taken to mean "doesn't go" in Spanish.

Even though I'm sure that a few Spanish speaking people got a chuckle out of the name, there isn't much evidence to support the story in real life.

It just looks like bad design to me. Just looking at that logo, I didn't associate it with Mauritius until I read down to the last line. It violates the "Five Second Rule." (Which posits that a person should be able to look at a sign or logo and know what it means in less than five seconds.)

How do letters made up of dots signify something about Mauritius Island(s)? Why is the letter "U" different than the letters "S?"
Why is the word "island" most prominent in the middle? Wouldn't you want the name "Mauritius" to be front and center rather than the last thing at the bottom?

What the hell is "sustainable" tourism, anyway? Just about everything that is "sustainable" (in terms of environmentalism) is seen as making compromises in quality for the sake of preserving something. (The environment.) It goes along with the old axiom, "Any food that's good for you must taste bad." Does it mean that "sustainable tourism" means that we get to stand on a cordoned-off boardwalk and look at the beach through a pair of binoculars?

I've seen better graphics design done by high school students!

[Frank Cox]

I agree with you about the rest of the design. The official Mauritian symbol (mascot?) is the dodo bird, and there's no sign of one of those in that design either.

Actually, I really don't understand how they got SUS into that with nobody at all raising a red flag. After all, it's Mauritian Creole, which is something that everyone in Mauritius understands. If you didn't know what sus means, that's one thing. But a Mauritian drew that (I guess) and the Mauritian tourism committee approved it. And nobody noticed?

Mo pa kompran.

Reminds me of some years ago when the chamber of commerce in Melville had a promotion where people got a ticket from local businesses when they shopped there and the ticket was good for a chance to throw an Oreo cookie into a bowl of milk from something like ten feet away; if you got the cookie into the milk you won a prize. So.... Shop in Melville and toss your cookies?

[Leo Enticknap]

And another one for you...

Before 1992, there was very strict regulation in the UK as to which institutions were allowed to call themselves universities. This led to what was effectively a two-tier higher education system, because graduates from institutions that didn't have the word "University" in their name (they were typically called colleges or polytechnics) were widely regarded as having second rate qualifications.

In an attempt to address this, the government changed the rules in 1992, essentially allowing any degree-awarding institution to call itself a university. This led to a rush of institutions changing their name accordingly. The problem was what to call yourself if there was already a University of [insert city or county name here] in existence. So Oxford Polytechnic became Oxford Brookes University, Leeds Polytechnic became Leeds Metropolitan University, and so on and so forth.

In the north east of England, an urban legend does the rounds that a brainstorming meeting took place at Newcastle Polytechnic as to what it should rename itself, and that the school's leaders eventually agreed on City University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. A significant amount of money had already been spent on branding, logos, and all that stuff, before one of the graphic designers involved in the project commented to his boss, "You do realize what acronym that forms, don't you?"