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Comment by lsmarigo | Hacker News Reader

Activities that can’t be billed to other agencies are another drain. One example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and doesn’t look as good.

for anyone else curious:

(new) Black Logo: https://18f.gsa.gov/assets/img/logos/18f-logo.svg

(old) Blue Logo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/18F_logo...

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This reminds me a time when I used to work closely with a design team in a web agency, it was very frustrating to work with them because every little modification to things like colors, sizes, buttons and the like would be accompanied with several hours of "design strategy", time that the designers would waste thinking and prototyping new ideas for the corporate image of any of our clients, I say "waste" because most of the time they would end up with a design similar if not equal to the original.

Their GitHub organization [1] shows significant activity, it is sad to see people spending their time, energy and resources on things that are ultimately not supported by their financial funds.

[1] https://github.com/18f

It took a couple of experiences dealing with serious, fancy pants designers to convince me that most of them are charlatans.

Even something as simple as widening a button was stonewalled by "explorations", "design strategy meetings", "pattern library meetings", etc. The end result was getting even a single component mocked up took at least a week and was no better than what I could have come up with in 30 minutes.

Not charlatans, but professional bikeshed painters :)

Quite a few UX/design people who have actually gone through education/training (as opposed to learning by doing) seem to suffer by an extreme form of process overload.

It makes sense I guess. It's really easy to teach processes and it probably makes the them feel "professional".

In many cases this applies to software engineering as well.

I don't want to blame UX people entirely for that. Designers have often had to elbow their way in to traditional software processes. One way to do that is by looking impressive to executives. It's sort of an extreme version of Calvin's clear plastic binder. [1]

I think it's made worse by the ubiquity of the agency business model for designers. Consulting agencies are forced to learn learn looking impressive and process-y as a vital sales tactic. It's not just design, either. Software consulting agencies have the same problem; if your clients can't directly evaluate your work, then you end up getting judged on what the people hiring you can understand. And that's often how well you dress, how glibly you talk, and how impressive your process seems.

[1] http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/10/31

I'm an UX/design person and I notice that too. I think you could put two capable teams to create a website for some company, one required to do a lot of research and documentation, and another left to design it as they please, and the result probably wouldn't differ much.

It's akin to software engineers spending time to automate tasks that aren't that recurring.

I don't think that's limited to designers.

That sounds a lot like dealing with B2B consultancy companies too.

IBM eat your heart out.

This reminds me a time when I used to work closely with a development team in a startup, it was very frustrating to work with them because every little modification to things like functionality, Git workflow, Javascript framework and the like would be accompanied with several hours of "dev strategy" and scrum meetings, time that the developers would waste thinking and prototyping new ideas for the tech stack for their managers, I say "waste" because most of the time they would end up with a system similar if not identical to the original.

From the actual report - "18F Branding – Staff spent 727 hours (valued at an estimated $140,104) developing the 18F brand. An example of one of their branding projects is the 18F logo change, seen below in Figure 8."

Pretty poor journalism. Brand development strikes me as a much bigger category than a single logo change.

Indeed, I remember a few posts/comments by 18f people here on hn - surely those hours taken were "spent developing the 18f brand". Of course, those people might have been doing that work for free, in their spare time.

Wow that's incredibly terrible reporting. Designing a logo is a subset of branding, and a small subset at that.

727 hours on branding in a year for an organization of 200 is quite reasonable.

Meh. I'm sure google spent millions on their logo change, and it was just a font tweak. Hackernews was gushing. God knows what they spend per week on google doodles.

There's no winning here for 18f. Either their sites are archaic disasters and they are criticized for not being up to par with the top tier consumer sites. Or they spend some money to bring them up to par and its "OMG! An $800 toilet seat!"

The difference being, of course, that Google is a massively profitable company that can afford that kind of expense.

And how long did that take?[1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/guess-how-long-overnight-succ...

Google wasn't going through giant rebranding exercising before they were massively profitable.

I want government sites and buildings to look like archaic disasters, because it at least implies that my tax dollars aren't being pissed away on frivolous opulence.

Google can spend ten billion dollars changing their logo because they're profitable and they answer to their board & shareholders. I don't remember anyone asking me if I wanted to contribute money to a government tech startup.

Do tell. What do you think about paying the salary of FBI agents who interfere in presidential elections?

It depends, will they use private email servers?

I don't have any credibility or knowledge to talk about the exact current issue at hand but don't we at hn pine over the beautiful past where email was distributed instead of going between Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Google? A private email server isn't bad by definition, is it? Perhaps we should try to help the "ordinary" person keep their servers secure?

It's bad when its purpose is the evasion of lawful public oversight, e.g. by FOIA requests.

> "Perhaps we should try to help the "ordinary" person keep their servers secure?"

Security wasn't the goal, evasion of oversight was.

Even if it was granted that security was the goal, you would expect the private server to be at least as secure as the @state.gov mail servers, otherwise you're wasting your time. Furthermore, James Comey's statement in July made clear that the private server wasn't as secure as GMail, the kind of email server an "ordinary person" might use. GMail may be centralized, but it's supported SSL from its public release in 2004. The server Hillary Clinton used didn't support SSL until the spring of 2009, months into her tenure as Secretary of State.[0]

The truth is we actually know very little about the operational security of the server because all but one of the IT folks in charge of running it plead the 5th before congress and only spoke privately with the FBI under conditions of immunity. Justin Cooper was the only one to actually testify regarding the specifics of the server, but his role was more administrative than technical.[1]

There's no credible defense for the SoS running a private server to provide email accounts which are less secure than the standard accounts used by the rest of the State Department. The diplomatic role of the SoS inherently requires a high level of OPSEC to carry out its most basic function of communicating with international leaders. Hillary Clinton avoided using the security available to her in order to thwart federal regulations regarding the preservation of public records. That action is no example that any member of the public should be holding in high regard as something worthy of emulation.

[0]: http://www.thompsontimeline.com/191/2009/03/29/for-the-first... [1]: http://www.thompsontimeline.com/tag/justin-cooper/

"I want government sites and buildings to look like archaic disasters"

And what do you propose doing about people who use arguments of the form: "Can you believe this government $thing? It looks like an archaic disaster. Government can't do anything right. Therefore..."

We'll have those people either way. Just ignore them

Government sites that look like archaic disasters are like that because the money was pissed away by people who have no desire to learn and want job security. I watched it happen a lot. Tech leads, with tech lead salaries who don't even know simple things like dependency injection and MVC design patterns. Yeah, that's where your tax dollars are going. I'm hoping that I can start my own business and get into this space. There's a lot of money sloshing around, at least I can bring real value and deliver working products while I'm collecting some of it.

What business does a government agency have spending nearly 800 hours (plus inevitable expenses on stationery, biz cards, signage, etc) on a logo? How does this benefit the taxpayer? Why do they need this logo? This logo changes nothing for anybody except the people who worked on it. This is not good stewardship of our tax dollars and you can bet your lunch that this won't be the only FW&A problem found at 18F.

> What business does a government agency have spending nearly 800 hours (plus inevitable expenses on stationery, biz cards, signage, etc) on a logo?

Presumably because they are trying to be a "startup", they are copying the business style of startups. It's easy to look back afterwards and say "that was a complete waste", but it's possible that at the time it was seen as justified. It's easy to say we'll just take the good aspects of startups and the good aspects of government agencies and reject the bad", but it's not always apparent what is the good and bad in each, as they are both fundamentally systems whose ultimate behavior is emergent from all their aspects. It's very easy to accidentally break something useful by tweaking or removing something that appears completely unrelated in systems like that.

That said, I think the more interesting question is should we be trying to emulate a startup in government, given that the vast majority of startups fail? In that light, it should be absolutely no surprise that 18F is failing. It was the likely outcome.

One thing that bothers me about government websites is the boosterism of whoever is in office. Secretary of State websites are particularly bad in this regard. Usually you go to the SoS website to do something related to licensing, like the DMV. Both Illinois and California have had headshots of the Secretary of State displayed prominently in the header. It is labeled/named something long winded like "Secretary of State Joe Blow's Department of Motor Vehicles Website". Is it on a .com or a .gov or a .(state).us domain for any given state? The generic "(welcome and platform) message from the Secretary of State" is often front and center.

Really, who the Secretary of State is is so secondary to the actual services being provided, all this does is serve to tell everyone who is responsible for this crap website.

If there was consistent branding, and that branding was strong and recognizable, citizens would be better served. You wanna toot your horn, put some metrics up like the last 6 months of turn-around time on license approval, website and phone service response time, help topics researched, costs to provide the services, etc, and show me how access to state services are improving over time, which is the SoS's actual job. Government agencies usually have weak branding because it gets upset based on term lengths (except for services like the IRS, which has pretty consistent branding and methodologies).

This blew me away when I first moved from Wisconsin to Illinois. I went from this: http://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/online-srvcs/external/dmv.aspx to: http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/

This isn't just a website problem either - the DMV in Illinois is really the Jesse White center based on the amount of branding and pictures you run into there.

The California DMV website has changed recently, and the headshot are in the footer, as links to their respective sites. This is an improvement, but the branding is still all over the place.

The new logo looks like something you would come up with if you needed a placeholder image for the real logo.

For the US Federal Government, it's fairly revolutionary.

Other governments spend less and get more impressive results http://www.schleswig-holstein.de/SiteGlobals/StyleBundles/Bi...

Reminds me of the million dollar Pepsi logo change, which basically tilted the old design a few degrees.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign...

There's probably a legitimate story behind this right? This sounds like the randomizer IBM made for the TSA where the cost was shocking but was explained away by overhead or typical government costs.

This is almost certainly off-topic, but am I the only one on HN who much prefers the newer logo?

It's a much better logo.

From an aesthetic perspective the old one looked like a sign from Studio 54. It was a late-70s throwback font: cool looking, but not really the right connotation for a tech team that is supposed to be dragging the government into the present. The new font and alignment is more neutral and graphical.

From a practical perspective, the new logo retains its legibility better at small sizes on screens, compared to the old logo's smaller thinner font. And making the new logo black and white reduces variants and therefore reduces cost. It's the same logo file whether you're printing 1-color, 2-color, or full-color.

And I thought 18F was supposed to be an example of government becoming more efficient.

This has to be a joke.

They should have just updated the old logo with the new font

Assuming $125,000/employee and 2000 hours/year that logo cost $45437.50.

That's GS-14/15 compensation based on DC locality[1]...doubt it.

Government hourly equivalent is also based on a 2087-hr divisor.[2][3]

[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... [2] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-admi... [3] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-admi...

The standard rule is to double the rate for staff to account for overhead - healthcare, retirement, paid leave, etc. If they're paying a GS-15 staffer $125k I'd be surprised if the effective net cost is significantly less than $250/hour – and that's probably a big win compared to a contractor charging you $250 for someone making $90k.

re-branding != a logo.

This is like whinging that an entire e-commerce system was just the compiled index.html

I heard from a few former employees that back in the '00s, a few years before their bankruptcy, Kodak spent close to a million dollars on redesigning their logo. They changed a font.

727 employee hours, in comparison, seems like a pretty sweet deal.

Not to mention that the logo change was only part of that 727 hours (But out of context, it sure makes for an awesome soundbite!)

That's almost unbelievable. This is completely absurd, on par with the mythical $800 government toilet seat, except that this cost us taxpayers far more. I'm completely disgusted. This is textbook fraud, waste, and abuse.

By the way, like a friend suddenly shaving off all of their hair, I consider a corporate logo change to be a harbinger of bad things to come.

> ...on par with the mythical $800 government toilet seat, except that this cost us taxpayers far more.

Sorry to burst your disposable consumer-centric bubble, but not all toilet seat applications are optimized for profitability at economies of scale.[1][2]

[1] http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3134/3086233389_568cac502b_z.j... [2] http://pics-about-space.com/space-shuttle-toilet-seat?p=1

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