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Comment by genzoman | Hacker News Reader

I worked for HP during their split. HPE paid some firm 500k for their new logo. Their logo is a green rectangle, something you could do in MS Paint in literally a second.

HP/E is way too bloated and IMO has very poor management. They have a nice patent portfolio, though.

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I agree the logo is bland and lame, but 500k for a firm to develop their new 'eye catching' identity seems roughly fair. They didn't pay 500k for a rectangle, they paid 500k for essentially a new brand, and picked the lamest one (imo)

Also look like companies like BAE, General Dynamics, Medco, and other fortune 100 companies, most of them are just text. How much do you think they paid for those logos? I mean literally anyone with a text editor can make one of these logos, but for branding it IS a 500k decision to make

Worked at HP 2000-2005, and we received detailed branding explanations. It was quite eye-opening, to me. Global markets, cultural meanings, etc. A lot of thought and legal review goes into it.

So by your logic, the more you pay for something the more complex it should be?

pretty much. Or rather: the more you pay for something the harder it should have been to produce.

I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.

99 percent invisible has a podcast discussing this issue with a designer who takes the opposite position. A main point is that a simple, reproducible logo is ideal.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-de...

Sure simple is good but a rectangle? Come on.

> I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.

How is that an excessive one-time marketing expense for a company with an annual revenue of $50 billion? That's 0.001% of revenue and is just a drop in the overall marketing budget. Engineers are quick to dismiss marketing and sales, but the reality is they are critical to any business. As much as we would like, technically superior products do not just sell themselves. It is especially funny because advertising is the bread and butter of two of the largest tech companies, Facebook and Google. As another poster said, this is creating a brand, not just a logo.

Far more went into producing that logo than just using the rectangle tool in Photoshop.

> harder it should have been to produce

I guarantee you, it was extremely hard to produce. $10k for three initial designs, $150k for dozens of meetings gaining approval from twelve tiers of managers, $50k to consolidate and synthesize hours of feedback from everyone and their nephew, $10k to fly out and present to the CEO, another $200k over again to scrap it all and re-do it from scratch, and then $80k to figure out how to get something that will not be vetoed by the 2,000 people who have involved themselves in the process.

A green rectangle is pretty much the only thing that can survive that meatgrinder.

That's a strawman. The point is that 500k is an incredible ripoff for a logo. Not that the logo should have been extremely complex.

They paid for a brand identity not a logo. They are very different things.

My assumption is that the firm(s) being paid for something like that have direct ties to management. Whether it's close friends or family members being thrown a huge bone, and, in some cases, having some of that money come back to the decision-makers through another channel.

According to my direct manager, HPE's management structure is going to be the hardest hit with these layoffs. I think she used the term "streamline" to describe what they're trying to do with the management structure.

That reminds me of when Dogbert created the "brown ring of quality" company logo.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-11

The ironic thing is that Lucent later adopted almost the same shape as their real company logo!

http://www.famouslogos.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/lucent...

I would love it if one of the Fortune 500 companies heeded HN advise and get their next logo from 99 Designs, spending 50$ on it and the invested millions in applying it everywhere.

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