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In the last few months, three significant new logos have shook the design community with their radical (though remarkably similar) solutions. Everyone's much reviled NYC and London 2012 campaigns from Wolff Olins, the agency that designers love to hate, and the much lauded new logo for Sak's Fifth Avenue from Michael Beirut, the designer to which all designers kowtow. But if you ask moi, only one of them is valid as a logo.

Here's the new routine: Olins gets on stage, unveils the new mark with a ebullient "TADA!", and the whole world shrieks in horror. Then the legendary design firm retorts, "No, no, no, you don't understand, look at it in motion." Then they push the button on their PowerPoint presentation, and the audience is assaulted with MTV music video filters a la Hype Williams and Spike Jonze. The logo is dancing and flashing and bursting vectors and sparkles everywhere, and the audience releases a great collective sigh of relief, and they leave with a "Phew. I was getting nervous there for a second..." I guess Fred Ebb was right:

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle
Razzle Dazzle 'em
Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it
And the reaction will be passionate
Give 'em the old hocus pocus
Bead and feather 'em
How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

Razzle dazzle 'em
And they'll never catch wise!

I'm sorry, but a gorgeous exercise in After Effects and Flash does not a logo make. It's a @#%% motion graphic. Taking a hideous mark and repeating it 1000 times until it's indistinguishable isn't a genius move; it's a desperate attempt to make lemonade. Charles Goslin, Pratt's grandfather of graphic design, wholeheartedly acknowledged that "anything looks good in a pattern." Even Paul Rand knew that he could fix a mark with a pattern. He used patterns for NeXT, Cummins, Westinghouse, and even good looking stuff like IBM. That makes this technique possibly a goody, but definitely an oldy.

You can't really argue that these techniques are a part of the brand's design vocabulary, because they don't have any counterpart in the print world. Taxis zooming through NYC aren't gridded with pattern, they're ugly. And 2012 t-shirts won't be moving; the mark will be frozen in plastisol ink. At the end of the day, ordinary people will see these logos sans fluff, and they'll see it for what it is: fugly.

Sak's Fifth Avenue, on the other hand, does has a print counterpart. Beirut's solution isn't a band-aid on an ugly mark, it's a definitive choice. There is no ugly logo that his lush patterns hide; it IS the logo. Rooted in history, influenced by cubism, and delightfully constrained, the mark's malleability is the design, not an add on. If there were no patterns, there would be no brand.

Wolff touts an "identity, not identical" belief. But the best marks that are coming out of the industry are doing that: Multiple Sclerosis' mark from Open, Saks mark from Pentagram—hell, Fossil's been changing their graphics for years and Absolut made an entire 10+ year campaign off of that strategy. But they didn't start with an ugly idea.

So Olins can continue razzle-dazzling their clients, but I'm not drinking their Kool Aid; I know a beautiful and smart mark when I see one; and those aren't. That's beautiful motion graphics. Nothing more, nothing less.