Euro 2012, Creating History Together

The logo and slogan of the 2012 European football championships (EURO 2012), were unveiled last December at a ceremony in Ukraine’s capital. The logo uses a bouquet with three branches and two adorning flowers. A ball is depicted around the central flower, with the left flower being red and white (Poland’s flag) and the right flower being yellow and blue (Ukraine’s flag). Below is the UEFA logo briefing: 

Visual identity
The purpose of the logo is to give UEFA EURO 2012™ a personality of its own, with the visual identity to be applied across a range of promotional applications from tickets to web banners. The objective is to help promote the tournament – one of the world’s biggest sporting events – by providing an easily recognisable identity with a flavour of the host nations. The logo takes its visual lead from ‘wycinanka’, the traditional art of paper cutting practised in rural areas of Poland and Ukraine, as a tribute to the fauna and flora of the region.

EURO bloom
The ‘bloom’ logo has a flower representing each of the co-host nations and a central ball symbolising the emotion and passion of the competition, while the stem denotes the structural aspect of the competition, UEFA and European football. Nature has inspired other features of the visual identity, with woodland green, sun yellow, aqua blue, sky blue and blackberry purple being the crucial tones of the palette of colours to figure in official tournament branding.

Uniting ethos
The event slogan, meanwhile, is ‘Creating History Together’. The staging of the UEFA European Championship finals in Poland and Ukraine, a first for Central and Eastern Europe, will have a place in the history books, with everyone involved in UEFA EURO 2012™ – organisers, host countries, host cities, players and fans – contributing to another exciting chapter of European football.

While elements work well in depicting the two nations comradery on this event, I have a core issue with this logo. How will the ever be produced in a 1-color format? Where is the simplicity of what a logo should be? This has so many different things going on (like small cliche icons of people in the flowers) in such an illustrative style that it becomes almost cartoonish. This seems to be the trend of the UEFA brand, should it continue?