You Could Do Almost Anything Part 1
elischiff.com
elischiff.com
That, right there, is a damning indictment of the entire modernist project: communication achieves acclaim because it fails to communicate; art achieves acclaim because it fails to be beautiful; life achieves acclaim because it is sterile.
As an aside, I love the dry tone of the piece, with lines like 'However, not only does the new abstract logo break this entire history, but it adds even more potential readings of the logo' — with a demonstration of how the upside-down new logo looks like a hand flipping the bird. The essay's full of bone-dry commentary like that. It's glorious in its restrained vehemence.
For example Apple's logo speaks very little to what it does, and to a greater or lesser extent so do many others including Uber (new and old), Xiaomi, Square and Palantir just to pick a few of the largest startup-style companies in the last few years. Of course the logos come to work as a brand and we identify them with those entities as we get to know the brands.
Under this criteria, isn't the objective of a logo to simply be recognizable? In that case, kind of in a self-fulfilling manner, doesn't even a critical article such as this one make it more successful?
Personally I like the logo, and I found it interesting to hear the logic behind it. Sure it's not to everyone's liking, but is that the point of a logo?
Likewise, the letters H and P say nothing about Hewlett Packard's business. That wasn't the criticism though. It was that the letters were unrecognizable as an "h" and a "p".
I'm not sure that's the point. I think the MITP logo communicates plenty - just not the letters MITP.
But then the MITP itself is redundant. Once you know a book is from MITP, you'll know it's from MITP whenever you see the logo.
Meanwhile the logo includes a selection of visual puns and allusions - machine rhythms, digital precision and predictability, books on a shelf, book pages, and so on.
It's not that modernism is ambiguous, it's that modernism has consistently tried to move past literal single-view single-meaning interpretations to condensed abstractions that suggest multiple views simultaneously.
It's actually about implying and suggesting as much as possible with as little as possible.
This is fine as far as it goes, but you now have a problem - instead of making a single straightforward statement that can be read by almost anyone who's literate, you're relying on a viewer's ability to read an abstraction in a way that makes sense of at least some of the same associations.
If you do this properly, you've packed in a lot more information, at the cost of making it inaccessible to many viewers.
It's now more visual haiku than plain talking, and it only works for some of the potential audience.
What happens next is worse. You have a situation where less adept talents claim to be able to pack in meaning when really they don't. They produce a cargo cult knock-off of a successful design, they decorate it with explanations written in text in a supporting document to sell it, but they don't truly manage to include the allusions they claim to be including.
This is where modernism stops working. You get something that's really just been converted back into a single-view statement or object in a naive and superficial way, and it completely fails to have the depth of a genuine rich abstraction.
It looks minimal, but it's all surface and imitation with no creative compression. That's when the communication stops and you have something that's likely to be annoying and useless, and probably ugly too.
I don't see how it "failed" at anything except meeting this author's subjective preferences of what makes a good logo. He even admits, "this became part of the charm of the logo for those in the modern minimalist establishment, for whom ambiguity is a virtue." So, he's free to disagree, but shouldn't act like he's "more correct" for having different values.
Is the author's opinion an expert opinion? Would you pay for it?
So we can paraphrase Beirut: "I'm a world renowned master logo-smith. I will be heralded as a master communicator. But you could do almost anything. I don't design my logos to communicate, because that's not important." And we're left to work out the values and hypocrisies that are all established into this culture.
I would probably not pay for this person's opinion because I don't share his values. I like abstract and minimal. I would rather pay for the opinion of someone whose taste I share and/or whose work I admire (in the context of choosing a logo for my business. In general life I like to be exposed to opposing/different perspectives).
Basically I just wish people would generally act less as if they have a claim to what's right or good or truthful, on such subjective matters, because they are really just sharing an opinion. To this author, communicating the brand identity is an important feature of a logo. No matter how many people agree, nor how many textbooks it's written in, nor how much data shows it drives profitability and brand awareness - it still can't be used to say that a logo is objectively wrong or bad.
Your argument re: experts fails because it reaches for the authority of "experts", while that's exactly what OP lampoons.
The multiplicity of nonsense words the logo could encode is irrelevant to its quality. Having seen and correctly interpreted 'mitp' once, top-down visual priming guarantees you will never again see 'imlji,' 'nnlji,' 'uolp,' or 'oulji.'
It's like those "can yeu raed tihs" memes. Of course you can read it. Especially the second time.
(I do think Cooper's original logo is brilliant, and the MIT Media Lab logos are overly systematized.)
I don't know how much the readership of HN is versed in contemporary American popular culture's obsession with the round rejection of traditional ideas of beauty.
I would go as far as to say that the current leitmotif seems to be 'embrace ugliness & dullness' for the sake of it and little else.
These general themes are found in all aspects of our current culture.
Perversion for the sake of perversion.
Bawdiness for the sake of bawdiness.
Irony for the sake of irony.
One can speculate on why and to what end this obsession with these revolting themes is so commonly found in these self-professed avant-gardes.
[1] Why Beauty Matters (Por que a beleza importa?) Roger Scruton
Personally, I'm hoping to see a post-ironic return to traditional values of beauty, purely as a way of flipping the bird to a society that finally embraces the new paradigm.
Easy is boring, hard is in charge. Or some other drivel to match the current trend. Because it's hot! hot! hot!
Feels a lot like an emperor has no clothes types situation and a lot people pretending there's science behind something that might as well be random.
“Yo, dude, success is failure,” Kalanick said, stopping momentarily and bumping his fist against my glass. “He who fails most — wins.”
As an aside, your tone makes you sound like a puerile weasel.
A logo does not need to tell you what it's for if your first viewing is out of context. In fact, 99% of good logos won't accomplish that task. The point is to be recognizable once you know what it is already, and be pleasant to look at over and over.
Now, whether any of the minimalist logos meet that criteria is up to the user. But judging logos on whether you can tell what they're for out of context is a false criteria.
How would you know the Apple logo is for a computer company out of context? You'd be more apt to guess it was for an orchard or cider company. How would you know the modern Windows logo is for the operating system out of context, and not just a bunch of boxes for a moving company or something.
Ambiguity in logos is not remotely a bad thing. What makes a good logo or bad logo is mostly subjective.
The main objective thing I would damn most of the logos highlighted in the article on is being so derivative that they become tedious.
But not entirely. There are some choices that can inherently weaken a design. A logo should be scalable; it should look just as good on a business card as it does on the side of a plane. A color logo should be able to be translated to black & white.
It might be informed by the name of the company, but certainly doesn't need to achieve a one-to-one association with the visual letterforms--we don't expect the reverse after all.
Memorability and distinctiveness is the end goal, and if your brand is strong enough that a simple mark will be sufficiently distinctive, then it's to your advantage to adopt a simple mark.
No one will forget that Microsoft is four boxes, and that the Internet is a blue e, even though these marks are visually panned, and in a context-free environment, only loosely associated with their parent brands.
"B-b-but their actions don't match their words" is the most uninspired of all criticisms. A logo is successful if it generates results, not if it is consistent with whatever principles the critic determines a good logo should adhere to. "You Could Do Almost Anything" is basically the complaint of either unrecognized talent, or the untalented, against the institution for failing to recognize someone whose work follows all the rules, but lacks spirit.
That's what this critique is -- a failure or refusal to see the spirit of the design, and insisting to measure it on a basis that only the author cares for. FFS, the guy drew a bookshelf so he could challenge the designer's intent to portray books on a shelf. Does he think the designer didn't know that a literal application of that principle would result in a broken shelf?
> One should note that there was a time during which HP intentionally made a reversible logo.
Should one note this?
This, for me, betrays the true roots of this critique -- unexamined appreciation for all things old, and refusal to recognize merit in new interpretations or to, even temporarily, suspend judgment. Essentially, he is holding their relative newness against them, and revering the old because he is already familiar with those rules. As if those older elements were not once new, and the designers were not also subject to similar critiques from their contemporaries, based almost solely on the fact that new things do not much resemble old things.
The author's own logo fails many of the standards that he holds for these other logos. Apart from giving the impression of inconsistent widths, owing to chamfered interior corners: the "S" of ES would never be unambiguously scrutable, and this logo would always need to appear beside the author's name in order to make sense.
However, despite the fact that his name needs to appear beside the logo, I cannot think of a more incongruous font to accompany that style than a modern sans serif font. The logo is done in the style of an 80s-90s sci-fi/futuristic movie title, and the name is presented in a mid-century sans serif font. I wonder what the author would think of it if he saw it presented elsewhere.
You're required to be pedantic if you want to examine something with any rigor. And yes, I'm asking that the designers provide justifications that logically cohere with the logo they are selling.
> A logo is successful if it generates results, not if it is consistent with whatever principles the critic determines a good logo should adhere to.
This is weak. It's a sort of argument to immensity–that if a company is big enough, it can "almost do anything" at all. It's the same argument that Bierut made, and I don't buy it. It's an essentially anti-critical position. One cannot judge a logo by a large company because by sheer weight, they will make that logo stick.
Moreover, I'm not providing the criteria for judgment–I'm pulling them straight from Cooper's mouth.
> is basically the complaint of either unrecognized talent, or the untalented, against the institution for failing to recognize someone whose work follows all the rules, but lacks spirit.
Tu quoque fallacy.
> This, for me, betrays the true roots of this critique -- unexamined appreciation for all things old, and refusal to recognize merit in new interpretations or to, even temporarily, suspend judgment.
This is invalid on its face. Half this essay is devoted to critiquing a logo from 1964.
> The author's own logo fails many of the standards that he holds for these other logos.
Tu quoque again.
I mostly agree with you in your response to the second point. I don't personally find as much fault with the readability issues because the logo would pretty much always be seen in the context required to make it decipherable, but I can understand why one might take issue with that. Ultimately, its important to remember that the logo is neither the brand nor a stand alone work of art. It is only a part of a system.
I think ultimately the pitfall of the don't make me think school of design is that it is susceptible to joyless, by the numbers design but I understand its utility. Also, ironically, one could probably say the same thing about modernist design.
Your article brings up some interesting points and valid criticisms, but I just don't personally agree with all of your values when it comes to design.
If Cooper is to be believed, then yes, we should.
> The current configuration allows for three separate moments of understanding: recognizing the symbol, seeing the letters, and then seeing the books.
If there had been no pretense to the second two elements being recognizable, then it would be no problem. Abstract symbols are more than acceptable. The issue arises when designers invent a story about a representation which is hardly represented at all. Until it is explained, most readers will not get to step two or three.
> Ultimately, its important to remember that the logo is neither the brand nor a stand alone work of art. It is only a part of a system.
True, and yet it's still important to design the logo intentionally for when there is no contextual system. If the logo is to be abstract, great. If not, that's also great. But no one should fool themselves about where they are on that spectrum.
> I think ultimately the pitfall of the don't make me think school of design is that it is susceptible to joyless, by the numbers design but I understand its utility. Also, ironically, one could probably say the same thing about modernist design.
Absolutely. I don't count myself as a member of the former school. I assert designers should merely be honest about their intentions.
> Your article brings up some interesting points and valid criticisms, but I just don't personally agree with all of your values when it comes to design.
That's the fun of it!
>That's the fun of it!
No, I am the arbiter of design and all who disagree with me are evil and wrong! Who moved my crown??
"consistency is more important than cleverness. Consistency is actually really hard to achieve. Cleverness is a cheap commodity."
I hope I can pull a Cooper the next time I am accused of being derivative and lazy.
(Side note: I feel that having to stare and figure out the logo really accentuates that MIT hacker mentality. It's a small, clever joke or puzzle, and that feeling of "oh I get it" seems superbly appropriate here. That confusion? That sort of exclusive humor/cleverness is classic hacker in-joke material.)