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What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

paulrand.design

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Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#41

Post by em-bee »

mannyv wrote: post #26
almiron10 wrote: post #12

As a graphic designer, it was the way Paul Rand pitched the design that was the major breakthrough for me. Through interviews you can see how he pitched himself and his process to Steve Jobs. Paul's confidence in his process, backed up with his experience, is what sold Jobs on using Paul Rand and gave me the blueprint in how to deal with clients. People don't realize that a logo is an empty vessel that is filled with…

Paul Rand believed that the logo was a representation of the company. Its job was to promise as to what the company was about, and it was up to the company to fulfill that promise. I wonder what his thoughts were re: political logos, like the Communist Hammer & Sickle and the Nazi Swastika.

isn't that pretty much the same thing? sell a product or an ideology. the logo is a representation of a brand that allows people to identify with it

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#42

Post by scrlk »

The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Vote Leave organisation in the 2016 Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for Vote Leave:

> The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/117842715/where-did-t...

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#44

Post by Eric_WVGG »

joezydeco wrote: post #24
solardev wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, attention spans were so much longer back then.

The AT&T corporation was massive back then. These folks were looking at rebranding every piece of equipment in the country, it wasn't going to be a cheap adventure. Bass did the right thing by making them comfortable with the cost.

I met a designer at Verizon once, asked what the hell the deal with their logo was. He acknowledged that it was rock-bottom, worst-of-the-worst grade… and said that their own internal studies indicated a multi-billion dollar project just to change all the signs.

Like, just look at that one sign overlooking the east river in NYC. That logo’s gonna be around forever.

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#45

Post by Eric_WVGG »

scrlk wrote: post #42

The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Vote Leave organisation in the 2016 Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for Vote Leave : > The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ adv…

Diabolical.

I followed your link expecting to see some hack work, and I guess technically it is hack work, but that "ballot box" thing really works.

ugh.

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#46

Post by JKCalhoun »

grahamj wrote: post #36
asveikau wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hour glass for the X. Imagine using a symbol for your powerful new computer that essentially means "wait". Are you sure you're not mixing timelines? Was the hourglass established for this metaphor in 1986? I first remember the hourglass cursor from Windows 95. At the time Macintosh used a wristwatch. This struck me as similar to Microsoft using "recycle bin" because they borrowed a metaphor and didn't want to say "…

I don't know if it was used in computer iconography at that time but I would have expected a designer to see it that way regardless. It means the same thing as the old Mac watch and is why MS used it in Windows. PS I miss that watch! It was way better than the beachball.

And the "beach ball" was originally the optical drive spinning, seeking.

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#47

Post by incanus77 »

fredoralive wrote: post #39
xp84 wrote: post #28

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.

Yep. It felt pretty even back then, where you could choose either. Get it? Java and Cocoa...

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#48

Post by linguae »

em-bee wrote: post #37
projektfu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Étoilé didn't get enough traction and they moved on. It was looking very attractive for a while. David is now working on CHERI.

that is the problem, unfortunately it will take a few dedicated people who do not worry about traction get a project like this to a useful state. i had long hoped for GNUstep to become a great desktop environment but at this point i am more likely to go with haiku, once they have a decent multiuser experience (which they are already working on)

Yeah, the other challenge with GNUstep’s adoption is building a desktop and an app ecosystem for it. There are some GNUstep apps, but the ecosystem is not at the level of KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK. In addition, even if GNUstep becomes fully compatible with the latest version of Cocoa, there are many macOS APIs that are not part of Cocoa. Another complication is the Mac ecosystem’s gradual move toward Swift.

Haiku may not have a dynamic API like Cocoa/GNUstep, but it already has a well-designed desktop and it is capable of running BeOS binaries on x86 (but not x86-64), IIRC. From a desktop perspective, Haiku looks very promising; it’s finally almost ready for prime time.

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#49

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

scrlk wrote: post #42

The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Vote Leave organisation in the 2016 Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for Vote Leave : > The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ adv…

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 ...

Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

#50

Post by stevedekorte »

threeio wrote: post #43

Literally got my Next Slab working over the weekend, seen presentation before and its put a good smile on my face today.

Congrats! I have strong nostalgia for the ones I worked on and owned in the 90s. Using those machines felt more like living in the future than any tech I've experienced since, including the iPhone.
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