The main logo dedicated to Republic Day of Kazakhstan, used by all state and quasi-state bodies of the country, has turned out not to be Kazakhstani at all, VRKNews.kz reports.
The embarrassing discrepancy was discovered, as usual, by a designer — more precisely, by Olzhas Mukhamedi, founder of the Kazakhstani graphic design studio Ideal Design.
“New Kazakhstan... Instead of holding a competition to develop a symbol for Republic Day, they stupidly downloaded a Chinese template from the internet. What a shame! Such a careless or disrespectful attitude to the country's main holiday…” Mukhamedi said wryly in his Facebook post.
The head of the Kazakhstani studio, which is one of the leaders in the domestic market for award items, nevertheless did not complete his research.
In the comments he also gave a link to the free work of a designer who (judging by the works displayed) allegedly developed this logo as early as 2020 — a certain Budi Setyo Pramono:
If you type “eagle logos” into the Shutterstock.com stock image database, you can find a picture practically identical to the Republic Day logo. The image is also on Adobe Stock, where it costs 79.99 dollars.
However, such a logo was also displayed by the Chinese studio 千图网, for example here:
For its part, the VRK News agency found that exactly the same logo was supposedly developed by a studio called TopStudio242, see here:
Besides, it can also be stated that this logo, only mirrored, has adorned since 2013 the website of the Polish company “Krysiak Polska”, which specialises in organising stages and concerts — krysiakpolska.pl.
So it is unclear who developed this logo first. It looks as though a whole investigation is called for. And it should have been carried out long before this long-forgotten logo was approved as the main symbol of the national holiday.
The Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Ministry of Information and Social Development of Kazakhstan have so far made no comment on this unpleasant incident.
