“Half a million quid to move a dot?!”
There’s been a lot of noise about the UK government spending half a million pounds on a “brand refresh” for GOV.UK – and most of it misses the point.
The outrage makes for easy headlines, but it also exposes how misunderstood design still is. Too often, people see design as decoration, just fonts, colours and logos. In reality, it’s infrastructure. It’s the system that helps millions of people navigate vital information clearly, consistently, and accessibly.
Function, not fluff.
It reminds me of Paula Scher’s infamous rebrand for Citibank.
In a preliminary meeting with the client, she sketched the logo solution on a napkin in five seconds for a $2 million fee. People laughed at the price tag, but that “five-second sketch” represented a lifetime of experience, intuition, and clarity. That quick pen drawing became the basis of one of the world’s most famous company logos.
Good design looks effortless precisely because it’s the product of deep, invisible work. Reducing a complicated campaign to a dot ignores requirements for coherence, accessibility, and trust across hundreds of services. Accessibility can seem like a buzzword, but it means that sites and portals need to work on many generations of phones, tablets and computers – and work for screen readers, voice navigation, high-contrast modes, and users with visual, motor or cognitive impairments.
Take that dot, for example. There’s a reason why the change has been made: “the dot in the wordmark moved up off the baseline to make the name look less like a web address, and it was used more broadly as a graphic device across different channels, as a ‘guiding hand’”.
A new brand is as much a communications decision as a design one, and here there’s room for criticism. The timing, coming just before another round of tax rises, is unfortunate. So too is the choice of colour: the newly bluer palette has already prompted claims of political signalling. The risk isn’t that this was deliberate, but that aesthetics themselves become politicised – a technical design is read through the lens of partisanship rather than public service.
Ironically, they’d be walking away from one of the few truly successful examples of public digital infrastructure and from the very brand equity this refresh was designed to strengthen. British citizens with only a singular passport might be surprised to realise just how uncommon it is to have a signal, unified end-user experience across a huge variety of regional and central government agencies. An academic review from this year said GOV.UK was “seen by many as the gold standard digital agency, copied in multiple instances and praised for its achievements”.
Scrutiny over public spending is healthy, but dismissing design as superficial isn’t. Design is how the government communicates, and communication is how trust is built. Reducing it to “a logo tweak” does everyone a disservice, including the public who rely on those systems to work seamlessly every day.
Maybe the real conversation shouldn’t be about the dot but about how much value we still fail to see in the work behind it.
Tom Caslin is Cognito’s creative director
