Amazon designer creates logo for villages' millennium celebrations

An award-winning designer behind Amazon's famous smile logo has lent his services to two Dorset villages as they celebrate their millennium.

Bruce Duckworth has worked with some of the world's most famous brands, including Coca Cola and Samsung.

After attending a residents' meeting about the millennium for Portesham and Abbotsbury, he offered to create a logo to help promote the events.

Mr Duckworth said its objective was to "bring the community together".

In 1024, Abbotsbury and Portesham were granted as manors by King Canute to his servant Orc and many of the boundaries defined in the charters remain the same today.

A "fayre through the ages", a Saxon camp and a concert by Dorset Police Male Voice Choir are among a number of events planned to mark the millennium year.

Organiser Karen Hodgeson said: "The charter, which is held at Dorset History Centre, matches the current boundaries of Portesham so this is the first record of the parish boundary actually being laid out.

"We organised an open meeting in October and invited all the villagers. Bruce came along with his wife and somebody in the room asked if he would volunteer to design us a logo."

Mr Duckworth said the Amazon logo, designed in 1998, was now "one of the five or six most famous logos in the world".

He said: "They wanted to tell everybody they were selling everything.

"We did the logo where the A connected to the Z, which meant everything, and then you took it off and it was a smile.

"Jeff Bezos apparently said, 'If you don't like this, you don't like puppies.'"

Mr Duckworth joked that the Portesham and Abbotsbury brief had been "one of the biggest commissions I have ever had".

He said: "The logo ties the disparate events together and its objective is to bring this community together and everybody can use it as they want for nothing.

"We've seen it used as bunting, flags, cups, pens, t-shirts - Karen has even been involved in putting the logo on the grass bank as you enter the village, so it's been made of stones as well, which I've something I've not had done before with a logo of mine."

Details of the events can be found on the Millennium of Abbotsbury and Portesham website.

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