141–150 of 259 posts
I miss the octothorpe (#) -- it was a clever reminder of Slack's origins in IRC, where channel names start with the same symbol. (Technically, in IRC, they could be prefixed with an ampersand (&) as well, but nobody ever did that. Great for making super-secret channels, though.)
[warning: cannot be unseen] There is a swastika hiding in the negative space in the middle of the logo.
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It's a swastikoid, like the Sun Microsystems logo (also Columbia Sportsware Company)! https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/ https://goodlogo.com/extended.info/sun-microsystems-logo-238... https://goodlogo.com/extended.info/columbia-sportswear-logo-...
The old Sun logo is forever one of my favorite clever logos.
http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html
Sun and SGI used to be such rivals, with their headquarters around the corner from each other, and their logos were always bombastically facing each other off and posing together in the trade rags and trade show floors.
I like to imagine them both spinning and swooping around playfully with each other in Logo Heaven.
This feels so generic. I get the problem they're referencing with too many colors and not working in all contexts. But the human mind being what it is, I never had a problem connecting "rainbow-colored #" with "Slack". This...this is just some kind of blob. I couldn't tell this apart from a big pharma company, or some kind of conglomerate that makes everything from toasters to jet planes. I'm reminded of the Philip M…
Wow. So you're telling me; that the icon that you've been viewing as the symbol for Slack over the last couple of years looked more familiar than the new logo they released today. That's mind boggling
Microsoft is red-green-blue-yellow Google is red-green-blue-yellow Now Slack is red-green-blue-yellow Who is next?
More interesting for the HN crowd I think is the article from the actual design company that did the redesign: https://www.pentagram.com/work/slack
I much prefer the (hopefully satirical) Pepsi Gravitational Field [2008] https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
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It's not an either-or thing. Slack engineers are still working on the technology aspects.
Hmmmm... yeh, but when any company starts messing with their branding, it frequently turns out to be not a good sign .
Large companies often do it. Microsoft has rebranded their visual assets a bunch of times. Doesn't seem like it was particularly ominous. Some companies in very competitive verticals are often built on their branding.
Some companies do waste a lot of money on debatable rebranding efforts (Uber / HP, etc.). It's a mixed bag.
> We’ll not bore you with the design thinking
With a logo like that, you had better at least link to it. Oh, you did. But the link's label was just "Pentagram," so I thought it was to the company's home page, not its specific story about this work.
I understand their complaint about the complexity of color, though I disagree. I thought it was beautiful, maybe worth the complexity.
Regardless, they seem not to know that the new logo is more complex, and therefore harder to be distinctive. They have traded complexity of color for complexity of shape. If you concentrate on the logo in outline, you can see that it has so many lines going so many different ways, all tightly packed, that the overall impression is a drop of rain after hitting the pavement.
It's hard to make good logos. For people whose only job is to make logos, it might in fact be harder. They're tempted to overthink it. They go through 40 revisions. The first two or three are often the best. This was the case here too, based on Pentagram's development artifacts. After a while your secret reasons behind each jot and hook overwhelm your judgment.
Maybe the best thing is to take a month off after you think you've got it, to get a fresh pair of eyes. All those fancy reasons you came up with to justify it fade away. Like, what are those raindrops around it? Oh, you say they're supposed to be speech bubbles. Well, they kind of look like speech bubbles now that you mention it. But not really, because speech bubbles are shaped differently when they contain actual speech. These look like drops. Scattered around the logo like that, it looks like what happens when you drop something.
