You can’t help but thinking the design process was just a bunch of completely random sketches accompanied with a story.
What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
91–100 of 115 posts
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#92The 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…
Dominic Cummings is an absolute mastermind, to a scary degree. One of those people, like Steve Jobs, who I can't help be awed by. Almost as if I live on a lower plane of existence to them
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then there's Pepsi. https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
Right. What am I looking at? It seems clearly a case that it started with the final logo they wanted and finished with 27 pages of pure justification BS.
Yes, but that's just how it works. A respected designer brings talent and years of experience, expertise, theoretical knowledge, and intuition to their task. But like most of us, they aren't very good at introspecting to explain the real reason they arrived at a particular design.
They are, nevertheless, required by business types to come up with some sort of justification, and that's what you just read. It doesn't matter whether it's truthful or accurate, so long as it's plausible from a business perspective.
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#94I might be in the minority, but the NeXT logo never looked good to me - there's something off with projection of the cube.
It's not just you. I don't think it works either. It's memorable, so that's good, but I don't think its flexible and I can't see it working below a certain size.
The NeXT logo is, like everything, a product of it's time. It would have had to evolve, just like the Apple logo. It's just that the apple with a bit taken out had a recognisable shape, which Apple have kept. NeXT would have had to transition as much as Microsoft has, because the Paul Rand design is so locked to that specific period in time. It's both the colors and the shape, where the Apple logo is just the colors. Maybe they could lose the writing and the colors, but then it just look like a Transformer faction.
The NeXT logo is interesting as an anachronism, forever locked in the early 90s, with no evolution, due to Apple buying the company.
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#95The sad thing is, the logo was a tiny part of the experience, which these days folks only see the successors of iOS (and derived) devices, and Mac OS X (or whatever they're calling it these days). At least we've moved on from the early releases where the Carbon Finder.app was a significant impact on memory, and the Java calculator app took multiple bounces to load Java and run. I just wish that Apple would do somethi…
Have you ever used GNUstep?
Back in the day I booted the live CD, and I bought a magazine ages ago because the cover disk promised a similar environment.
I actually talked a co-worker at a previous job into using it (he was doing Mac OS X development at work, didn't have a Mac at home, and was able to use GNUstep for this after a fashion).
I do have a Linux box which I can use for it as well, and experimenting with it there is something I want to do now that my MacBook stopped supporting my Wacom One. My next tech purchase will be a Raspberry Pi 5, and I hope to experiment with GNUstep on it.
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#96[deleted]
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#97A video of Steve Jobs (and his staff) seeing what he paid $100,000 for. https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand
> Jobs had a sneak preview of the logo and loves it. As he awaits the verdict from his stuff, he can hardly contain his excitement. Assertive as he is, he values consensus.
That was just ... weird.
Knowing how temperamental and petty Jobs was and seeing how excited he was about the logo and Rand, all others present simply had no choice but to praise it.
No way of knowing what they really thought about it.
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#98I might be in the minority, but the NeXT logo never looked good to me - there's something off with projection of the cube.
It's not just you. The e always annoyed me. It's just... not right.
The logo as a whole is supposed to be fun, creative, and polished, but there's something dissonant and slightly abrasive about it.
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
back in the day, during a talk about Westinghouse, we were all admiring Rand's striking and iconic Westinghouse Logo, the theory and precision behind it. A little boy pointed at it and said "That logo is dumb." And it was at that instant that we all suddenly realized that it was a pretty bad logo. We moved on to the next topic quickly after that.
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?
Re: What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's fugly and orientation is messed up; the weird angle is OCD-triggering. They should just have taken the square with the "NEXT" letters, rotated it so that it's straight. Would be a lot better.
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.