Dubai: Nothing has been more synonymous with shopping, winning, and entertainment for the family in the region as the ubiquitous Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) logo for nearly two decades.
Once these shopping bags in different sizes and designs and in different colours are displayed prominently on a street or a shop, the atmosphere of the city instantly changes.
But what does this logo really mean? Gulf News traced the origin of the famed shopping bag to a creative team that was originally tasked with charting the path of DSF, its branding, its meaning and its promotions in 1995.
“If you look closely at the logo, you will see three colours — red, green, black — which are the UAE national colours. The form of the logo is a shopping bag because it’s a shopping festival,” Avi Bhojani, Group CEO of Bates Pan Gulf (BPG) Group and one of the architects of DSF, told Gulf News.
“Within the shopping bag, the most prominent part is the red part that when you read it signifies a letter ‘D’, representing Dubai.”
The logo carries figures of four people positioned in the middle of the bag. Bhojani said. These figures point to the family, which has been the primary target market of DSF from when it debuted in 1996 until now.
But the logo did not pop up out of the blue. It was carefully thought of for more than a month by a creative team led by Bhojani and Vikram Tavate, then senior art director at BPG, who came up with the design.
Tavate, who is now back in Mumbai running his own design studio after working in the UAE for 18 years, could not be reached at the time of going to press.
In an interview with Gulf News when he was still Dubai-based, he said the ordinary shopping bag was stylised to make it modern and give it a distinct identity. He said all the “elements had to come together in a 10 x 10 square cm [canvas], and they had to tell a story.”
Ultimately, other designs that showed discounts, price tags, and bar codes were rejected. Bhojani said, “We explored a thousand options and came down to three designs.”
Those that made it to the final cut were taken by Mohammad Al Gergawi, now the Minister of Cabinet Affairs, and Mohammad Al Abbar, now the chairman of Emaar Properties, who was then the founding Director-General of the Dubai Department of Economic Development, to His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, for his final approval and selection.
Now, nearly 20 years later, the logo has been through a number of “cosmetic adjustments” but remains essentially the same.
The Macintosh-made logo sported ragged edges in 1995 until 2002 when it was registered as the official trademark of DSF. By 2006, the edges were smoothed out and the logo had a three-dimensional look. In recent years, DSF organisers have been placing yellow price tags on the handle bearing which edition of DSF it is.
Currently, around 950 logo compositions of various designs, including motifs, shopping bags and three-dimensional displays, can be found in the city.
