SPECIAL REPORT: 1Malaysia x Klang Valley MRT Logo Competition with an Ugly Serious Rant

This is not a ‘design competition’. It is a popularity contest.

You put some text and visual elements together, creating a sort of ‘image’ that adheres to the website’s guidelines (a certain tagline, size etc) and you upload it. Then the creator will ask all his friends to vote for his logo. The more Facebook friends he has, the better, perhaps.

Who cares about the logo’s design qualities? “Vote for me! If I win, I will belanja you makan!” Spam your friends, bribe them, hack into the system and vote forever until you get 1000 votes — who really cares about design?

Thus this competition should be renamed: “WIN MONEY FOR BEING THE MOST VOTED IMAGE-UPLOAD CONTEST”.

This competition is a disgrace to Malaysian design/designers. If they were serious about it, the organisers should really sift through the 5000+ logos for work that might actually have substance. I’ve browsed through the entries before and out of the hundreds I’ve skimmed through, there were 1-2 that were a lot better than the juvenile crap that you see in the winning selections.

The ‘winning entries’ are very misleading now too! These are ‘winners’ — to the public, they ‘are great winning designs’ — Malaysians should emulate this style — it’s unique, it’s modern, it’s the new century of design, of new transport… etc. What a farce it has become to the many local graphic designers that are serious about their work!

So to the commenters here that say “stop complaining and do something!” — even if you have a international standard logo uploaded there, it will never win unless if you DESPERATELY call for votes… become a super kiasu “VOTE 4 ME” political party candidate.

Sadly, most probably, your work, however great it would be, would be sunken into the less popular pool and be left unnoticed if you do not go and 'sell-out’ yourself. It would be useless to ‘compete’ in this sort of thing when Design after all is not the main precedence, but rather ‘the number of votes’. Ridiculous… How can they be serious about that shit winning Consolation 3rd? Sad sad times we live in…