Plastered all over Amman these days are logos of Zain, the new corporate identity of mobile service provider Fastlink. (You can read the history of Fastlink here.) Fastlink was Jordan’s strongest brand, as pointed out by Ahmad Humeid. It’s disappointing then that Jordan’s strongest brand image, which was fairly nice, was replaced with the ghastly Zain logo. While arguments could be made about the swirl or font, the coloring of the logo is simply grotesque. (Greater details on the logo are here.)

To make matters worse, the ad campaign in Amman until very recently slightly revealed the full logo. So all one could see were images such as this:

Or other images which showed the logo cut horizontally. Many consequently know of Zain as “Zoin,” since the letter “a” was cut by half making it appear as an “o.”

Congratulations to the design firm that is responsible for making Amman slightly more ugly. Clearly the folks at MTC never came across Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. If so, they would have asked for their money back.