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Go's New Brand

blog.golang.org

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Re: Go's New Brand

#171

Post by wiremine »

chrisseaton wrote: post #169
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?

It is (in my experience), although that's not the point.

They are satirising how clients tend to destroy good designs with bad feedback.

Re: Go's New Brand

#172

Post by pier25 »

It's ugly. Looks like a brand of sport shoes for 12 year olds.

I think the brand for a programming language like Go should not look like a toy.

Re: Go's New Brand

#173

Post by chrisseaton »

wiremine wrote: post #171
chrisseaton wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is (in my experience), although that's not the point. They are satirising how clients tend to destroy good designs with bad feedback.

Maybe the clients know more than the designers about what their requirements are?

Re: Go's New Brand

#174

Post by wiremine »

chrisseaton wrote: post #173
wiremine wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is (in my experience), although that's not the point. They are satirising how clients tend to destroy good designs with bad feedback.

Maybe the clients know more than the designers about what their requirements are?

Sure, you would hope so.

The problem is all in communication:

1. Communicating the requirements with enough clarity to enable the designer to translate those requirements into creative.

2. Communicating constructive feedback to adjust the creative.

The most productive exchanges are when the client understands the creative process.

Re: Go's New Brand

#175

Post by omarforgotpwd »

zokier wrote: post #109
omarforgotpwd wrote: post #80

Whatever. Everyone hates new designs at first and then we get used to them. Go is cool and I think it could be a good thing that they're putting some work into making it look cool. It's good to have an awareness of your programming language among non-technical people and use branding to communicate qualities they can't pick up by actually using the language.

> they're putting some work into making it look cool They might be trying to make it look cool, but what they have accomplished is to make it look corporate, which is pretty much diametrically opposite of cool.

Developers will use Go because if its technical aspects.Features like concurrency primitives that make go what it is. Nobody is going to ditch Go because they don't like the new branding. "Rewrite everything in Rust, the new logo sucks". The branding is for non technical people, like executives and other non-technical employees across the company. What they are trying to convey to these people is that there is something new, exciting, and better happening with Go -- something developers know, but others who don't understand technical details won't get. The other purpose is probably to highlight to Alphabet investors the investments Google is making in the Go programing language, and to try and make them understand how impactful that investment has been.

Re: Go's New Brand

#176

Post by arnvald »

pier25 wrote: post #172

It's ugly. Looks like a brand of sport shoes for 12 year olds. I think the brand for a programming language like Go should not look like a toy.

That was exactly my first thought. Just add 2 more letters and you have "GOAL", a new brand of soccer equipment for children.

Re: Go's New Brand

#177

Post by rqs »

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…

> 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? Will you give Go a try if they rename themselves to Luxurious Smart Mice then? :DDDDD

Re: Go's New Brand

#178

Post by carapace »

matt4077 wrote: post #166
carapace wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

D'oh! I mispelled "lieu" but corrected it within the edit window. Heh.

That's classic: I'm scolding the other fellow for not looking where he's going and I walk into a pole myself. Heh.

but... I'm a rando posting in anger. They're a brand company that just released a thing for Google with a typo in the "Brand Guide". (It's in the PDF, is it in the hardcopy? I'd be mortified if this was my project.)

I don't really have a response for your point about screen reading.

Re: Go's New Brand

#179

Post by stonogo »

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…

Apologies, but I disagree with basically everything you're saying here.

Branding isn't hard; forcing a constructed brand is hard. That's the real source of friction here.

A brand might be way more than a logo, but THIS brand is not. That logo is literally the only thing this design agency contributed at all. Even the colors were already in use around the project. If the difference between "a brand" and "a logo" is "ten pages of marketspeak" then I'm even less convinced that branding is hard.

I read the "brand guide." It's exactly what I expect from a professional design firm: meaningless noise, carefully typeset. The entirety of section 1 is a PR quickref chart, of no interest or use to anyone but project managers dealing with micromanaging executives. Section 2.0 is breathless pseudo-art crap and some trademark defense. 2.1 contains pointless backstory for fonts that are firmly in the "Google already had lying around" category. Finally, the cartoon gets its own section, expressly to head off the whining from the old guard.

I've also seen a ton of this crap over the years, and none of it has ever made the slightest bit of difference. This is exactly the kind of time-and-money-wasting that occurs when some facet of management has gone off the rails. Let's hope the derelict in question is somewhere in marketing, and unable to affect the quality of the actual technology in question.

As for the actual logo, I don't have an opinion about it. I don't think there's anything there to have an opinion about. I've never been a big fan of the gopher cartoon, but at least it had some character, which likely comes from the talent of a real artist.

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