Also by christian

Via the Dot Earth blog comes this particular exercise in car-crash PR. Maybe you've managed to miss the section of the BP website which contains the work of the 'BP Reporters' - corporate lackeys who are paid to produce puff pieces about Louisiana and how the company is responding to the oil spill.

There have been some absolute shockers - Ballet at sea is a wince-inducing 'favourite' in the office - but a new post where their reporter Tom Seslar flies over the gulf in a helicopter, without once sighting the oil spill - or at least, without referring to it.

When we heard that Tony Hayward was scheduled to speak to the World National Oil Companies Congress – a collection of the greats and good of the oil industry – we knew it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

We wanted to challenge him to live up to BP’s slick branding and actually take the company 'beyond petroleum' in practice, rather than just talking it up. Whether it’s a business model that causes disasters like the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, or that drives BP's investment into the Canadian tar sands, the dirtiest oil available, or that assumes that six degrees of climate change is an acceptable price to pay for doing business, it’s clear that BP needs to change.

The first weekly winner from our logo competition, by Ken Cool.

Man, if I'd know our competition to redesign BP was going to be this successful, I'd definitely have chained a couple of volunteers to computers in the basement to deal with all the entries. (Want to volunteer with us, by the way?) As it is, I've spent a solid two weeks staring at a laptop screen downloading, saving, converting to JPEGs, typing into spreadsheets... I want my life back, as Tony Hayward might say.

Nah, only kidding. It's been great, and the reason it's been such an amazing couple of weeks is that the quality of the entries is so staggeringly, mesmerisingly, awesomely high. I think it's fair to say that every entry, from the sublime, to the ridiculous, has something about it which is great. Maybe it's the idea, or an amazing level of design skill. Maybe it's the dark humour that many of the logos show - or maybe it's the heartfelt plea for a different way of doing things. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.

BP has a really nice logo, but it doesn't really suit their dirty business. To me, a shiny green logo doesn't really suit a company that is responsible for the oil currently gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and onto the beaches of Louisiana, or the company that's sanctioning environmental disaster by being poised to invest in the Canadian Tar Sands.

We think the BP logo could do with a makeover, and we'd like you to design a new one to really show what lies behind the logo.

But hey, environmental disaster is the name of the game when you're committed to exploiting unconventional oil. As the wells get deeper and the oil sources get ever-more marginal, the risk to the planet increases.

But still, it might grate a little that a company that is actually considering investing in the Canadian tar sands, which is basically the dirtiest way to produce oil going, describes itself as ‘beyond petroleum', and has a green flower as their brand identity. Could you design them a logo that's more suitable?