NeXT logo by Paul Rand (2010) | Hacker News Reader

NeXT logo by Paul Rand (2010)

logodesignlove.com

133 pointsBud62 comments

Love this

> When Jobs was asked what it was like to work with Rand, he said, “I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.’”

Web design, every day. Customer has a shit site, they know it’s shit, they want to pay someone $$$ to do a new site, and they want to change 75% of the new design because they think they know better than the designer...

After working in a web agency for years I learned to be very wary if the client’s current website is terrible.

My first reaction was to think ‘what a terrible job the previous lot did, I’m sure we can do better than that’.

But it’s always the clients fault.

Either they slowly unpick all the design decisions so the new site is no better than the old one, or they balk at the cost, get it developed on the cheap overseas, then pay us more than the original quote to fix all the resulting problems.

Good clients already have good websites.

I noticed the guy who designs icons for me always leaves what appears to be a deliberate mistake, I then point it out and it gets fixed. I know what he is doing and I'm pretty sure he knows I know what he is doing.

It's called The Duck Technique, after an apocryphal story of an animator for Battle Chess.

http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck-technique

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess#Development

I've been tempted to make a Removable Duck for Unity3D and sell it on the Unity asset store for hourly freelance developers to use.

It will quickly pay for itself: The developer can drag a duck into the scene and configure it to define how many hours it will take to remove, and what kind of removal interface and effect to use. Then when they show the demo to the client, and the client demands "Remove the duck!", then can say "Ok. That will take X hours." Then they simply type some secret hot keys or click on some invisible hot spots for a while, and the duck will pop up a count-down timer and slowly start shrinking or dissolving or whatever, until it finally disappears after X hours with a puff of smoke, and then the developer can bill the client for that many hours.

Which in turn is a version of the old tradition of movie directors to include a scene that was so over-the-top that when asked by studio executives/MPAA to cut the movie a bit, this scene can be sacrificed.

Because the designer isn’t Paul Rand. You earn the privilege through having tremendous success. Most designers simply can’t do that.

More likely because they can't sell like Paul Rand did. It usually comes down to the pitch.

Brilliantly captured here: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

"You are no longer a web designer. You are now a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing, and instant messaging." That's a hilarious comic. It reinforces why I took two steps down a career in graphic design and then ran away.

I would love to read a treatment of why the client-designer relationship is often so dysfunctional. I know we all can trot out ideas, but I want an in-depth, serious, unsarcastic treatment, all the better if it points to a cure.

That's how my tailor operates, too, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If sartorial skills were my forte, I'd be his competitor, not his customer.

Same story here with Richard Serra: "Serra was invited to outline a proposal, for a fee, but said no. According to Cross, Serra told Ross, “You know what I do—you know that it’s going to be structural steel, you know it’s going to be monumental. What do I need to show you?” He added, “Hire me and I’ll go to work.” (Serra, through a representative, confirmed that he declined to participate but denied that he used these words.) Ross, recalling the encounter, described Serra’s work as poorly suited for the site, because it was “very subtle” and “not iconic.""

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/thomas-heather...

You get to a certain level, you can charge for your process, as it should be.

There's always a bigger fish.

Reminds me of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead

Personally I hate the NeXT logo. I've always thought about just how awful I think it looks every time I see it. This is the first time I've got the sense that people genuinely love the logo. Very interesting!

The logo looks great on an actual NeXTstation, cube, or MegaPixel, since those are entirely black. The logo pops right out. It really does look good IMHO.

It’d be interesting to imaging the modern evolution of it equivalent to what has been done to the Apple logo over the years, appearing in the same places the Apple logo does today.

Yes! I'd like to see that, too.

That's fair. I only see it on websites and books.

In the context of the 80s-early 90s color preferences, it's great -- and it still stands bold today. It's also more humanist than techie, and Jobs also wanted that.

Note too, that most logos in use today are tweaked versions of their former designs, even if the designer was such a design icon as Lowry (e.g. Shell and BP logos). For example Apple's rainbow logo.

> It's also more humanist than techie

I think it looks as if designed by a techie.

But your looking at it from the perspective of 2018. Back then it was a bold and striking logo for a computer company. As another commenter said, perfect for the late 80's early 90's. In fact if you look at the London 2012 Olympics logo that too was gaudy but it did its job and the wider marketing materials did a fantastic job of building on it an applying it across everything.

You know... I'm a "Rand" fan, but I never cared for the NeXT logo either. It's just so cheap-looking (at least to me) and jarring compared to his other work. But then again it never had a presence in my day-to-life either, unlike IBM.

I'm also in the 'not a fan of the Next logo' camp as well - to me it just seems too noisy, pretentious and out of whack. It reminds me of American cars of the period, which were gauche and terrible. It has an unsettling geometry, which almost seems unfinished. Plus the typeface is just .. wonky.

I guess all these things add up to 'cool logo by a millionaire for a billionaire' in some peoples minds, but to me it just seems like cat barf. Literally, as in .. something that was just spit up, with chunks of undigested stuff in it.

I never knew who Paul Rand was. This is great. Especially whoever linked the list of his work.

I wanted to draw the mild comparison to a Canadian with a similar cultural impact here: Allen Fleming.

Unfortunately Fleming died young otherwise his work might Have pervaded.

He designed the CN (Canadian National Railways) logo that’s still used, Ontario Hydro, was art director at Maclean’s magazine, Ontario Sciene Centre logo, and was responsible for many designs at Cooper & Beatty Type— including the type-o-file. He also literally wrote the book on designing Canadian stamps as I just found out.

http://www.marthafleming.net/allan-fleming-project/

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/designkultur.wordpress.com/2010/...

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/allan-fleming-the...

https://gdc.design/fellows/allan-fleming-fgdc

He designed the IBM logo too? Literally my two favorite logos of all time! He's a genius.

It's shockingly hard to find a single list, but yeah, he was prolific and extremely effective.

He also did the UPS, PBS, ABC, Enron, westinghouse, and surely many other big ones that slip my mind.

PBS and westinghouse are especially favorites of mine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rand

I found a single list!

http://www.paul-rand.com/foundation/identity/

Takeaways: 1. The IBM logo was iterated on. IBM clearly didn't love the first one and it was ugly. 2. The OS2 and NEXT logos are very similar. The clients wouldn't be happy if they saw them side by side like they're displayed on that page.

I remember seeing that OS/2 circle on books and boxes and it never even occurred to me that it was 'the' logo. It appeared as if a single (OS/2) circle was a unit applied indiscriminately.

Most of these are beautiful, but there are a couple that make me cringe... The Cummins one in particular (http://www.paul-rand.com/assets/gallery/identity/logo_cummin...) has a very MS Paint feel to it to my admittedly untrained eye.

You don't have an untrained eye; you've looked at logos all day long for your entire life. Some of this guy's work was great, and some of it was crap. The same could be said of a collection of any person's work.

>You don't have an untrained eye; you've looked at logos all day long for your entire life

That's like saying "you have had a body for your entire life, don't let any doctor tell you what's good for your health".

People can listen to music for their entire lives and still have crap taste.

Sure, but this is presumably just a small sample of his work that he's most proud of and has self selected.

It's interesting / surprising / puzzling to me that someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating his craft and presumably knows far more about design than I do would choose to showcase something that appears to me to be a total eyesore, which makes me think I might be missing something.

He's dead, so they weren't self-selected—they were just what he's done. He did other things than logos.

He really liked tilted squares, huh?

LOL, that Enron logo was pretty sweet!

I chuckled at that, too, but I have to admit: you could show me that tilted E and I'd recognize it as an Enron logo this many years later. Even scarred by infamy, it's a very memorable symbol.

I am sure the similarity with the E Corp logo in Mr Robot is pure coincidence (or maybe not) http://mrrobot.wikia.com/wiki/E_Corp

It even says so in the trivia section on that very page: "During an interview on Google, Sam Esmail, the creator of the the series, stated that E Corp's logo is actually the Enron logo."

Evil corp logo is definitely a direct reference to Enron logo

I like all the tilted square ones.

The Gentry Living Color makes me think of Google, the color palette, the g letter..

The Cabbages and Kings Catering one seems weirdly out of place.

I always liked the OS/2 logo, didn’t know why until now.

PBS logo is so great, so memorable. How many logos could most people draw from memory? How many are Rand’s? I’d guess a non-trivial percentage.

PBS logo was done by Tom Geismar, not Paul Rand, though Tom studied under Paul.

Tom Geismar also designed the Chase logo, which he talks about in a great episode of the design podcast 99% Invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/making-mark-visual-id...

He also designed the original UPS logo. I could never believe they willingly ditched a Paul Rand design.

Agreed, the current logo seems like it was designed in the "Web 2.0" days. "It's a shield! Look at how gradient it is!

Near the Ottawa tech distinct in Kanata we have the NeXT Restaurant which has a very similar logo:

http://www.nextfood.ca/

I guess now that NeXT has been defunct for decades, being inspired by its logo isn't a big deal.

Apple actually still maintains the NeXT trademarks[0].

[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

A trademark in the technology class would not apply to a restaurant anyway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_(Nice)_Classif...

I can't remember where I heard this story, and don't know if it's true, but the story was:

Steve Jobs commissioned some famous European designer to come up with a revolutionary design for his awesomely great NeXT computer. When they flew out to see the design, it turned out to be shaped like a human head, so a pissed off Steve Jobs and his team got back on their plane and flew back to the US.

There's some mention of it here:

http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/10/steve-jobs-most-i...

Known for his fanatical approach towards hardware design, Stevie was poised to make the company’s first-ever computer a machine that embodied power and strength. Repulsed with the results of the several design houses he hired to create protoypes, including one that resembled a human head, he brought in the designer of the Snow White design language, Hartmut Esslinger, to create the final product. Jobs immediately labeled it the NeXTcube when shown the end result. Even though the machine stoodout as a complete failure, it was the NeXTcube's groundbreaking form factor that established the radical design identity of Apple’s future desktop machines.

If you’re new to Paul Rand, there is a very good book on his work:

Paul Rand https://www.amazon.com/dp/0714839949/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_4GO2...

It isn’t of practical value, but it makes me happy to discover another distinguished member of the Secret Council of /(\b[plurandy]+\b ?){2}/i.

How To Burn $100,000 In 100 Pages, the book.

Logos are pretty easy to make, rarely important, and spending excessive money on them is always a vanity (or incompetence) expense by founders / C suite. Companies/products make the logos, not the other way.

Well, sometimes. It’s no coincidence that the Nike swoosh fits perfectly along the side of a shoe. If you’re a design company and you can integrate your logo as a design element and it adds something instead of standing out as a gratuitous advertising badge, you have an advantage. See also: the three Adidas stripes.

This guy has a pretty diverse skill-set! He's great at graphic design, debating, and politics.

I hate making these types of trashy low class reddit-esque quips, but did everyone see the guest appearance by Napoleon Dynamite towards the end of the clip?

(2010)

> The NeXT logo mightn’t be a classic [...]

Excuse me!?

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