Category: design

Via Quipsologies, an interesting perspective on the advent of more and more people having opinions on logo and brand redesigns: Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport.

Redesigns such as Tropicana, UPS, and the University of California are used as examples. (Come to think of it, this isn’t all that recent a development; I was at AT&T when Lucent (RIP) was spun off, and their “Innovation Ring” logo was mocked by none other than Dilbert.)

The post gives an interesting, in-depth perspective, and is a reminder that people don’t necessarily love new designs just because they’re new and “better” according to the designers.

I was surprised by how often the civilians [non-designers] got it “wrong,” voting enthusiastically for the cartoony old version of the Comedy Central logo, the needlessly fussy and insecure pre-redesign Starbucks, the dated Clarissa Explains It All-era Nickelodeon splat. After a few hours of air-conditioned anthropological observation, a number of precepts emerged, almost all of which rang as true in my professional experience as in Building 110.

… Third, and most crucially, people prefer the thing they’re used to rather than whatever new thing you’re foisting on them.

This is unfortunately as true for software & user interfaces as it is for logos, though we can make those work better, be faster, do more, etc., in order to make it worthwhile for our users to endure the change.

I also loved this distillation of, well, of a lot of “discussion” on the Internet:

A seemingly endless series of drive-by shootings punctuated by the occasional lynch mob, conducted by anonymous people with the depth of barroom philosophers and the attention span of fruit flies.

As the saying goes: opinions are like assholes; everyone has one. When I first heard about the UC logo, I thought it looked dumb, too (though I was prejudiced by the Daring Fireball post that got me there). But there’s a lot more to it than a simple graphic that “a 4-year-old could have made”. Next time I have that reaction, I’ll remember this “Spectator Sport” post, as well as the UC logo post by Armin Vit he linked to, and think twice.

A logo doesn’t have to be the equivalent of a book trilogy and tell all its story through a circular device. A logo, actually, is nothing. It’s useless. It derives meaning from what it represents. I’ve said this before: The Nike swoosh logo is shit. It’s a clunky checkmark. People think it’s great but it’s not. It’s the amazing athletes and their stories that Nike has associated with over the decades. It’s the quality products. It’s the great ads. It’s not the logo.

… Funny story: You know what Nike founder Phil Knight said when he was presented (and proceeded to select) the swoosh logo? “I don’t love it. But it will grow on me.”

This anecdote by Marco Arment of happening by a Microsoft store on Surface launch day is snooty and condescending, which makes me feel a little abashed that it resonates so much. On the other hand, I can appreciate how satisfying it is to long-time Apple users for the tables to be to turned on the old monopoly.

But I don’t think many Surface buyers are going to comparison-shop with the iPad, or vice versa. It’s very clear who the Surface is for, and it’s not us.

The Surface is partially for Microsoft’s world of denial: the world in which this store contains no elephants and Microsoft invented the silver store with the glass front and the glowing logo and blue shirts and white lanyards and these table layouts and the modern tablet and its magnetic power cable. In that world, this is a groundbreaking new tablet that you can finally use at work and leave your big creaky plastic Dell laptop behind when you go to the conference room to have a conference call on the starfish phone with all of the wires and dysfunctional communication.

But it’s also for people like that salesman who don’t agree with Apple’s choices: people who want to have more hardware options, more customization, more hackability, and fewer people saying “no” to what they can do on their devices.

Apple’s products say, “You can’t do that because we think it would suck.” Microsoft’s products say, “We’ll let you try to do anything on anything if you really want to, even if it sucks.”

That last bit is especially pertinent to me, with regard to design and feature decisions we’re making at work. Though all of us there admire and wish to emulate that spirit of Apple’s products, I think we have to admit that for our products, in our market, with our users, we’ll never be able to be that strict. (Of course, we’ll do our best to minimize the “even if it sucks” part.)