Interesting to see that they've used the logo that I reproduced (in my original post below) throughout their document, although when they specifically mention the Official Emblem (Section 2), then they use the Wikipedia/widely distributed version. Weird.

Here's a large version of the logo that I pulled off the PDF, with the nice gradients and drop shadows.

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When I see the 2010 FIFA World Cup logo online, which is fairly regularly, I'm curious why it's always the version that can be found on Wikipedia, which is unfortunately also the version on which the multitude of criticisms were based when the logo was unveiled last year. Wikipedia list the image with FIFA.com as the source, which I'd be willing to dispute, but you never know.

Is this poor brand management on FIFA's part?

They'd want to protect the identity of the World Cup, obviously - but given the persistent use of this version, and the unofficial vector file in the wild (which if I'm not mistaken, is mostly incorrect), are they not doing more harm by not providing a replacement or making the official version available? Hackers Hawkers will always find a way, so that can't be stopping them?

Take a look at this logo that FIFA are using on their website - notice the colours, gradients in particular, bevel on the outer green swish, etc. For comparative purposes, I roughly attempted to reproduce it using the vector EPS as a base: here's the result. Huge difference.

Switch Design could provide some insight (hey! you guys reading this?). After browsing through their impressive portfolio, I discovered they're also responsible for designing the familiar CI's of Ceres, Clover, Juicy Lucy, SAB, SABC and Steers, to name a few.

Here's another discovery I made, to further put things into perspective. The two logos on the right contained FIFA copyrights dated 2006 and 2002.

Interesting, né.

The US-based IAB has issued guidelines for rich media ads that are designed to simplify the online ad planning and buying process. Over 30 of the leading online publishers, representing 65% of total advertising inventory are or plan to be in compliance with these guidelines.

The article goes on to mention the list of 40+ companies that are or plan to be compliant. So if you didn't already, you now know which domains and media dimensions to block using your favourite ad-blocking Firefox extension(s). Ha! Suckers.

Following up on their wonderful (look for my sarcasm) "approach life differently" television ad campaign, Nedbank now have the perfect website to match. I'd like to pull it apart when I find the time, but right now all I can say is that they have a tremendous amount to learn about providing their users with a website that is both usable and accessible. Placing a 360kb flash file (which reloads on every visit due to it's random nature) at the top of the site containing hybrid television/radio advertising is in my mind one of the most useless applications of flash technology I've ever encountered. Sitting on a broadbank connection, they still haven't loaded by the time I've clicked on a link to navigate to a new page - rendering them completely useless despite that the content they contain was useless to begin with.

It makes me cringe at how their Access to Information footer link
a) Launches in an inaccessibly-linked Javascript popup window,
b) The popup window isn't resizeable,
c) The content is an Acrobat PDF document, for which a plug-in is required, though no mention of this is made beforehand.

And they're probably not aware that their "invisible" clickStream graphic (for measuring site traffic) at the bottom of their site contains their dev.nedbank.co.za (broken link) URL.

I won't even get started on their cross-browser compliancy.

I've linked to Nedbank before on my very outdated evangelism page and simply couldn't resist the opportunity to pull it apart - again. Full review will appear here soon.

As for Old Mutual, who missed making it onto my hall of shame list, even though their website is developed exclusively for an Internet Explorer 5.5 and 800x600 screen resolution setup - who cares that the homepage "took 0.000 seconds to download" ?