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Go's New Brand

blog.golang.org

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Re: Go's New Brand

#161

Post by indescions_2018 »

wiremine wrote: post #123

Caveat: I'm a software developer who's worked in agencies for half of my 20 year career. A few thoughts: 1. Branding is hard: everybody things they can do it. Creative direction and art direction are really, really hard. If you haven't seen the "Make my logo bigger cream" video, go watch it, and then have some grace with the Go team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgcX0y1Nzhs 2. A brand is WAY more than a logo. I ge…

It's because branding is so dashed hard. And because it must capture the soul of the product. Its raison d'etre. That makes it so easy to miss the mark. It's only allotted 100ms of human response time to make a user fall in love.

And I do believe this rebrand is a miss. Nothing about it communicates Go's unique personality. Or deep tradition.

Compare to the incomparable Paula Scher's work at Pentagram. I'll single out the rebrand for MIT Media Lab. About as good as it gets. Mapping perfectly to the myriad bespoke research programs in everything from "affective computing" to "soft robots":

https://www.pentagram.com/work/mit-media-lab/story

In any event, I love that this turned into such a lively discussion here. We should have more of these live critiques. The value of this kind of feedback is amazing ;)

Re: Go's New Brand

#162

Post by tentakull »

21 wrote: post #86

Reading the comments here makes it clear why most programmers should stay away from design. I've programmed for 20 years now, but that stupid gopher and the way it was everywhere was a serious put off for me on giving Go a look. Nerdy AF. Good riddance. I wonder if there was a huge internal battle between the brand savvy people which realized how terrible the gopher was, and the Go creators. Guys, don't be so stereot…

Or maybe you shouldn't have designers that clearly can't draw.

There's a long history of slightly or outright irreverent logos in the hacker community and you're on a forum that at the very least pays homage to that culture.

As others have pointed out, Hexley.

Re: Go's New Brand

#164

Post by tentakull »

This is interesting to me. I have more than a peripheral interest in art and design, but my day job is heavy systems programming using Go/Scala and the like. I think there is a huge market advantage to correctly branding stuff developers use. For me this is, excuse the hyperbole, almost objectively a terrible rebranding of Go. The Gopher, while not currently wholely representative of what Go has become...is iconic and a lovely homage to the playfulness and irreverency of hacker culture. What an opportunity to update and infuse the brand with how the language has developed. I love what other people are doing with the gopher (like the the dep packager).

On top of this, I can't get over the fact that the design team can't draw. What? How much are you guys getting paid?

Re: Go's New Brand

#165

Post by carapace »

matthberg wrote: post #67
cup-of-tea wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I really like Python is it never had any of this crap. It's popular just because it's useful and people like it.

I think that though Python is popular independent of its branding, it definitely has a strong branding system, just less explicitly stated as go's. Their font is quite iconic, and their logo and colors more so: https://www.python.org/community/logos/

That all happened waaaay later.

Re: Go's New Brand

#166

Post by matt4077 »

carapace wrote: post #160
wiremine wrote: post #123

Caveat: I'm a software developer who's worked in agencies for half of my 20 year career. A few thoughts: 1. Branding is hard: everybody things they can do it. Creative direction and art direction are really, really hard. If you haven't seen the "Make my logo bigger cream" video, go watch it, and then have some grace with the Go team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgcX0y1Nzhs 2. A brand is WAY more than a logo. I ge…

I see that "Brand Guide" as style over substance personified: > Roboto is a contemporary sans serif typeface designed for readability. That's an oxymoron: "sans serif typeface designed for readability". Thin sans serif body text is how you show you hate your reader's eyes. And they didn't even run a damn spell-checker over the thing: > For additional background and guideance (sic) (Points for using the correct word "…

For screen reading, sans is often preferred. It's possible that this is somewhat outdated advice with the advent of High-DPI displays, but it certainly still holds true if you're targetting a diverse set of devices, including older screens.

And, since you went there first: "lieu".

Re: Go's New Brand

#167

Post by matt4077 »

ysleepy wrote: post #56

Looks awfully like design by committee, lowest common denominator taste. There is zero distinctiveness and character. Even java kept coffee cup and duke.

Even?

If there's one crime against UI and design that stands far above the others, it's Java's GUI framework.

Re: Go's New Brand

#168

Post by [deleted] »

nukeop wrote: post #73

Go developers are busy making fancy (or rather, pretty generic and bland) logos and thinking about "brand identities", while developers who use other languages do actual work. Does a programming language really need a logo, a cartoony mascot, an entire "brand guide" pamphlet and a "visual identity"? RMS was right when he said that software industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. We see this when develop…

[deleted]

Re: Go's New Brand

#169

Post by chrisseaton »

wiremine wrote: post #123

Caveat: I'm a software developer who's worked in agencies for half of my 20 year career. A few thoughts: 1. Branding is hard: everybody things they can do it. Creative direction and art direction are really, really hard. If you haven't seen the "Make my logo bigger cream" video, go watch it, and then have some grace with the Go team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgcX0y1Nzhs 2. A brand is WAY more than a logo. I ge…

What is the 'Make my logo bigger cream' video satirising? Is it a common reaction from clients of design agencies to ask for the logo to be bigger?

Re: Go's New Brand

#170

Post by dmd »

Zyst wrote: post #143
zokier wrote: post #34

This makes me incredibly (to me) sad. The identity is so completely soulless, and the logo is the opposite of timeless, trying to grasp currently oh so hip and pop retro aesthetic. Nevermind that the retro logo and super sleek modern visual identity seems to clash with each other, both are abandoning the playfulness that was so prevalent before, most clearly evident in the various Go gopher illustrations. And its not…

I didn't even know Go had a logo, so long as they aren't touching the Gopher I honestly don't care.

But they are. That's what this is about.
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