Hasta La Ideas

With the Danish capital declaring itself ‘cOPENhagen’, the city joins ‘I amsterdam’ and ‘LondON’ in the trend for word-within-a-word logotypes. But where else might benefit from this touristic wordplay?

What might be termed branding tmesis, or a form of visual infixation, works like this: take your city or country name (the anglised version is most commonly used in tourism) and see if it contains a word within it that could be adopted as an appealing slogan.

For example, similar in its tone to ‘I Love NY’, where Milton Glaser replaced the word “Love” with a heart symbol, in The Netherlands KesselsKramer came up with the inclusive-sounding ‘I amsterdam’ a few years ago.

It works both online at iamsterdam.com…

…and it even translates into physical type sculpture, too, which in turn becomes a desination in its own right (shown here, outside the Rijksmuseum):

In 2009, the VisitCopenhagen organisation launched its cOPENhagen: Open For You campaign, branding the Danish Capital Region anew (brand director: Jacob Saxild). In the UK, the branding is currently running in newspaper ads.

Its designed to be interpreted by users…

…and, again, used across a range of media:

So in the same spirit, I wondered where else in the world might be able to trade on this quirk of naming?

Well, Finland, Romania, Tuvalu and Estonia could surely do well out of accentuating the positives, as above. But what about Columbia? Or Australia? Vietnam? Something for the graduates, too? Hold tight…

Tenuous you say? These are mere puns? Well, how about this effort for the Cuban capital, with apologies to the late Freddie Mercury… It is the whole city name after all. (Though might be a job to get it onto a T-shirt, let alone a badge)…

And this one would definitely get me thinking about a trip to Aruba:

Really though, the best example of potential word-within-a-word branding has to go to Japan. Simple, universal, graphically appealing, too:

Also looks great on a T-shirt.

UPDATE: Martin at elneff.com has more on the phenomenon on his blog, “Cope with it (pun intended)”. While the cOPENhagen work is currently being used in the UK press, Martin also informs us that branding excercise launched in Denmark in 2009. Thanks Martin.