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New logo

slackhq.com

251–259 of 259 posts

Re: New logo

#252
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And let's not even talk about that sweet negative space swastika. Oh god, cannot unsee. Edit: It's not even negative space. I just see it as a swastika.

Oh come on. There are other logos like that. Do you see a swastika on Google photos? Why not "look at that sweet negative space windmill"? Eye of the beholder, I guess.

The google photos icon is obviously a windmill, there's not whitespace for lines.

Re: New logo

#253
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% slack is essentially evolved irc.

The part I quoted was about Twitter, not Slack. Slack's relation to IRC was already mentioned. Essentially, my comment was "Not just Slack, Twitter too was inspired by IRC."

I'd bet that quite a lot of early Twitter users were also IRC users.

Re: New logo

#254

Marketing veteran here. Just like Uber and Instagram, they messed up big. They took something iconic and replaced it with something forgettable. The first sentece after they show it tells the lie: "Firstly, it’s not change for the sake of change." Unfortunately, due to the nature of company politics, this kind of thing usually happens because a new CMO or other exec comes in and needs to "mark their territory". Marke…

>Marketing veteran here. Just like Uber and Instagram, they messed up big. They took something iconic and replaced it with something forgettable. The first sentece after they show it tells the lie:

Yep; exactly. These companies are successful and their logos are recognizable. Google had the right idea, they become successful and then they tweaked their logo over the years: https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/history-of-the-google-logo...

>Marketing in tech right now is having a big problem with people rising to the leadership ranks that really don't understand the basic fundamentals of the craft

Can't blame them; tech industry has been focused on tech and some business and of course people from other departments are starting to figure out they grow their career in leaps and bounds just by switching to a tech company rather than fighting in the highly competitive playgrounds of ad/marketing agencies and other companies.

Better to be a big fish in a tech pond than a small fish in a marketing pond.

Re: New logo

#255

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.)

This was the cool part as others have noted. For the techies and nerds, # = IRC and it's like "cool, a nod to tech we know and love and now we have a replacement for". For the Twitter or Facebook generation it's a hashtag, "cool, a nod to something I use everyday and love using."

Re: New logo

#256

Why do companies insist on rebranding every few years? Is it just to keep the in house design team busy? The old logo was memorable and has established Slack as a recognisable brand. Why change it when there is no shift in direction of the company or product?

>Is it just to keep the in house design team busy?

Yes, that's essentially it. Most projects are make-work to some extent when you're paying for people's time in monthly or yearly increments.

Re: New logo

#257

Marketing veteran here. Just like Uber and Instagram, they messed up big. They took something iconic and replaced it with something forgettable. The first sentece after they show it tells the lie: "Firstly, it’s not change for the sake of change." Unfortunately, due to the nature of company politics, this kind of thing usually happens because a new CMO or other exec comes in and needs to "mark their territory". Marke…

Yeah this seems to be pretty much the definition of changing for the sake of changing. Just somebody tries to prove their existence, prove that they've got something to do. Thought it is related to the design team but apparently the decision has to be made by the marketing team, and the design team is just the executioner then?

Re: New logo

#258

Marketing veteran here. Just like Uber and Instagram, they messed up big. They took something iconic and replaced it with something forgettable. The first sentece after they show it tells the lie: "Firstly, it’s not change for the sake of change." Unfortunately, due to the nature of company politics, this kind of thing usually happens because a new CMO or other exec comes in and needs to "mark their territory". Marke…

No, they did change it for the sake of change. The new logo is pretty ugly.

That's what the OP said: "The first sentece after they show it tells the lie"

Re: New logo

#259

Look, I get that the four outer dots are probably supposed to look like speech bubbles. But they look like squirts. Emoji squirts. Which are associated with sexting. And squirting is kind of associated with sex in a lot of people's minds... I'm trying to keep an open mind. But the logo is four squirts around four lines of roughly phallic proportions and rounded ends. Seriously. This was literally the first thing I sa…

Any line is a penis and any droplet shape is female ejaculation? Stretching it a bit, I think.

I don't think anybody was suggesting the droplets were female ejaculation. Male, more likely, since we're dealing with four big penises.

And stretch though it may be, GP isn't alone in seeing this. Whether people continue to see the phalluses and associated droplets in everyday usage of Slack, that remains to be seen, but good design doesn't need time to run its course so that people stop noticing the bad bits.

I recall when I designed a logo for the radio station at which I worked. The concept was a flat circle with a cutout of a set of headphones. Unfortunately, the headphone cutout was a bit too low on the side, so what was supposed to be the space in between the headphones wound up looking like a bloated penis. It can happen to anyone.

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