101–110 of 115 posts
When I read the jobs biography I had to put down the book and look up the next logo after how important that logo and design process seemed to have been. I was quite disappointed and find it hard to say anything kind about it. It works a lot better on Steve’s t-shirt where you can’t see the box.
the logo is one of the best ever made.
I loved—and still love—this logo. Maybe it's because we have a gazillion startups and companies now, so every single logo looks the same to me. These old logos have spirit and personality.
This is truly a stunning logo, it’s timeless and sublime. Hard to beat work like this
The presentation at NeXT office was recorded and is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUTxtvlyJDc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the difference between art and design is that you shouldn't need to know any of the back story for design, it should just look right, even if the lay person can't quite tell you why it looks right. Nobody needs the backstory on the Nike tick. You don't need to be told that the lines on the FedEx logo are beautifully balanced.
> You don't need to be told that the lines on the FedEx logo are beautifully balanced. What lines?
I might be in the minority, but the NeXT logo never looked good to me - there's something off with projection of the cube.
[0] https://archive.org/details/CrowleyTheBookOfTheLaw/page/n3/m...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, the calculator was a Java app? What versions was that the case for? That’s really funny.
Apple got aboard the Java hype train with early versions of Mac OS X, they added a bridge so that you could write Cocoa apps with it, so the calculator is presumably a case of them dogfooding it. It didn't catch on. The bridge stuff was dropped after a while, and then built in Java was dropped just before the Mac App Store was launched.
If NeXT were still around to day the logo would be changef to the word "Next" in black sans-serif, not stylized in any way.
https://www.myfonts.com/products/pro-condensed-extra-black-1...
https://ia600906.us.archive.org/31/items/NeXTSTEP33CISC/NeXT...
I find it interesting that the final logo choice is not like any of the sketches. You could imagine that someone came along and went "no, not like any of that" and came up with something different. It's also humorous to me that the designer was considering something that looks like an hour glass for the X. Imagine using a symbol for your powerful new computer that essentially means "wait".
I assume that association is why Rand abandoned the concept, but the opposing arrows also represent a crossing-over / pulling-apart / creating-reality / 2D-becomes-3D / new-dimension kind of thing.
The eventual Mac OS X uses the same symbolism. I remember being irrationally annoyed back in the day at the way Stebe Jovs would pronounce it “Mac OS Ecks” instead of “Mac OS Ten”, and it took me like twenty years to realize that it is actually Mac OS Ecks — it's Mac OS Up + Down. Peep the negative space and you can see the arrowheads, plus the axial tilt and crossing-over encoded in the way one opposing arm and leg of the Garamond X are thicker: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joewhk/1805068540
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For other reasons, I had come cross Cummings substack a couple of weeks ago - highly instructive, no wonder he was ejected from UK gov circles ...
I explored the law. Cutting a long story short I figured out a way in which one could (legally) hire someone to pop around to Gould’s house in the middle of the night and go through his bins the night before bin day. For roughly a year I read many documents from the Blair inner circle including notes from Blair. Many of them were market research about the euro. I saw Gould writing memos for Blair who would try out id…
Guess he didn't get the "gentlemen do not read each other's mail" memo - may not be a gentleman at all ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the goal of a logo is to be memorable, not just "look good"
I remember it looked terrible and unmemorable. Really, if you asked me 5 minutes ago to draw it I’d be unable to. I only remembered it was some sort of ugly use of the NeXT characters. Apparently people’s response to it is polarizing. I always thought it was a ridiculously bad logo.
