You Could Almost Do Anything Pt. III
elischiff.com
elischiff.com
Design for logos and branding doesn't happen in the platonic realm and isn't focus grouped against brand-unaware Martians; such designs are engineered to serve a real role in the real world, in the minds of real people.
When you propose a super simple abstract logo -- a dot, a circle, a slash -- it works or not depending on if the organization in question is already well known or not.
Thus, proposing such a logo to a client is a form of flattery -- you, yes you, are already so well known you, yes you, can get away with simply having a slash for your identifier! -- and that is all there is to it.
Like all things this can be cargo culted, and smaller clients often want to look bigger than they are, so sure a lot of un savvy operations wind up with fashionably vague and functionally inferior designs, but it's always been that way.
Lastly, it also matters that logos appear all over the place today -- print, web, tv, mobiles, tablets, etc -- and simpler, cleaner logos are easier to make work across all physical scales.
This isn't a problem vector assets solves, either; at smaller sizes you need to change proportions around and generally cheat the spacing -- in short, smaller physical representations look better if deformed into charicatures -- and it is hard to get external parties to respect your rules about which variant to use at which sizes.
Much easier to make something that looks reasonable at all sizes and scales and use it consistently.
Judging from what actually gets picked most of the time, you'd be surprised.
The web is full of critics who themselves couldn't hope to achieve what they call out as mediocre. All I've learned from this series of blogs is that forward slashes are bad. Criticism without showing a better alternative is so pervasive and so draining.
Teddy Roosevelt put it well:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Not necessarily -- it actually could hurt.
A lot of masters are too self absorbed in their own work and own preferences to have a wider appreciation of the field -- and especially to appreciate a valid style that's nonetheless against their own aesthetics. That's what a critic is supposedly above.
Plus, for them there are always potential issues of rivalry and personal interests at play (since they compete for the same gigs with people they criticize).
It's not just an excuse to say "That sucks." It's about pointing that there may be alternatives to beliefs, customs, and cliches that have become accepted as standards.
I don't always agree with Schiff, but it's always good to have a voice that calls out industry standard trends and doesn't just assume they're worth following because everyone else follows them.
There's too much of that in corporate design, and a dissenting view is welcome.
Stand-ins aren't always correct. There be fallacies, beware.
Right now, the Soviet Design System (SDS) has decreed that we must all have minimalist everything. Eventually folks like Eli will get us back to something with more flair and embellishment. And then that will be the correct way, and everyone must do that.
But the question is, when will we start designing for context and people rather than some arbitrary, centrally decided (by the fewest people) paradigm of correct design?
A minimalist logo in a sea of embellished logos says "We are smarter and easier to use". A minimalist logo in a sea of minimalist logos says "We are safe and normal."
So following a design trend can be one of the tools you use to design for an audience.
Some of us never stopped. Fortunately for all of us, just because someone with a blog or some business with a popular product decides they like a certain style, we don't have to design our blogs and our products the same way. As with any kind of hype, the best solution I know to the current promotion of minimalist styles is to see whether there is anything useful in there and if not then to ignore that hype and let the results speak for themselves.
>What I see in front of me is a rectangle with a green stroke. Perhaps Gomez-Palicio and I are looking at something different. Either way, ostensibly Whitman had fully justified the HP mark, so why did Gomez-Palicio feel compelled to invent metaphors where there were none? This compensatory narrative about server rooms shouldn't be necessary.
Yet this is exactly the rationale behind the 'Slate' thing which had some weird allusions to a corporate tower block and random space pictures. Why did everyone start gushing over it?
They're certainly fun to read, but does he actually think this is a remarkable insight into anything? You can pick any shape you want and then point out how logos are all trending towards that shape. Obviously by just selecting the logotypes that fit your argument.
It's a weak argument (what is it, anyways?) presented in an unhelpful way (criticizing a kid's school project?). Not that I buy into the idea that you have to be an artist to be a critic, but I do think your overall output to a community should be positive. You can either contribute critically by making good commentary or you can contribute productively by making good work. Eli does neither, and by the 3rd or 4th post you read by him it becomes painfully obvious.
Entertaining nonetheless, I suppose.
Unfortunately I found there wasn't much there. Whilst some (most?) of the articles seem to dig into some depth, it's all over shadowed by a negativity that has nothing to back it up, just empty criticism. It's telling that I can't even determining if he's arguing from a pre or post-modernist perspective, or even from a different perspective completely.
I found it all a bit disappointing really. I think he has a point to be made in there somewhere, he certainly begins his arguments from a position that seems tenable, but for the life of me I couldn't prune it from all the dead-wood of negativity.
I really hope the author does dig in and argue a point, because like I said, it certainly feels like he's arguing from a position.
I just hope that after all that, his point isn't "design is art" because he can GTFO :)
The color choices for the UI in Windows 8 were just so odd as a whole. It's as if Microsoft was so criticized for being too 'cartoony' with XP that they just completely went off the wall.
It literally looks like a window receiving light from the outside.
The windows logo before 8 did not make any sense at all to me. If I show it to the younger generation they will ask me what is that logo.
Just like when they ask what is the floppy disk icon and why is it used as a save