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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

[warning: cannot be unseen]

There is a swastika hiding in the negative space in the middle of the logo.

To be fair, there's swastikas hidden in all sorts of innocuous places. It's such a basic shape (which is why it was historically popular) that it's hard to avoid accidentally incorporating one somewhere.

Anything with rotational symmetry runs a high risk of somehow incorporating one.

> Anything with rotational symmetry runs a high risk of somehow incorporating one.

Well, anything featuring right angles, four lobes, and rotational symmetry. Drop any one of those and the accidental swastika risk drops tremendously.

Love it. We paint red swastikas all over for Diwali.

You’d expect a million dollar design company would put a little extra effort to avoid it.

Good eye. Swastika patterns are always something to beware of when creating a pinwheel based design, whether in a logo, decoration, architecture, or even just pinwheels.

Or we could just normalize it as just another shape.

Quite the contrary, I can't see it.

Look at the purple space between the colors

There were very fine logos, on both sides.

https://imgur.com/MIg6FpN

That's really tenuous. Like, you really have to try to see it.

I'm wondering if the designer was Indian, because it does actually look rather close to the original Hindu swastika with it's dots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HinduSwastika.svg

It's a swastikoid, like the Sun Microsystems logo (also Columbia Sportsware Company)!

https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/

https://goodlogo.com/extended.info/sun-microsystems-logo-238...

https://goodlogo.com/extended.info/columbia-sportswear-logo-...

Here, perhaps, it can be christened "the slackstika".

The old Sun logo is forever one of my favorite clever logos.

Up there with Scott Kim's original SGI logo!

http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html

Sun and SGI used to be such rivals, with their headquarters around the corner from each other, and their logos were always bombastically facing each other off and posing together in the trade rags and trade show floors.

I like to imagine them both spinning and swooping around playfully with each other in Logo Heaven.

It's like the arrow in the Fedex logo or the 35c3 logo [0].

Once I see it, that's all I'll ever see.

[0] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2018/wiki/images/9/99/35C3_Lo...

Except the arrow in the Fedex logo was entirely intentional and highly brand-relevant.

https://www.designernews.co/stories/99987-slack-new-logo

Top comment on DN:

"Looks like a swastika made of dicks."

I initially saw that or rather felt something was off and then identified it as swastika. Oh dear!

It reminded me more of the Visitors logo from the TV miniseries "V".

You mean the one that was deliberately designed to look like a swastika, and even used in black on a white disk in a red field in their flags to underline the “hey, these guys are like Nazis” vibe?

It's just 4 F's

You really gotta work for it. Also, that would be the Buddhist rather than the Nazi swastika.

I'm sure a rational discussion about co-opted symbology is what what Slack wants associated with their new icon/logo, rather than many people's visceral gut reaction that is almost certainly independent of the sense of rotation.

1) It's not entirely obvious; I had to search for it.

2) It's literally a different pattern than the Nazi swastika. The shorter portions break right in the Nazi symbol, left in this image.

1) "Not entirely obvious! A great place for a dogwhistle!" I'm obviously not suggesting that whatever graphic designer intentionally slipped a Nazi symbol into Slack's new logo. But, much like the arrow in FedEx, once you see it it's hard to unsee.

2) Most people can't tell you which way the outer parts of a Nazi swastika go and which way non-Nazi swastikas go. That's what I meant about sense of rotation in my comment above. Moreover, most people can't immediately reconstruct a logo to begin with, though they can recognize one. But something like this https://imgur.com/a/CZWtXez passes at first glance and is much more swastika-y.

What is the point of making a 'dogwhistle' comment if you have to follow up with explaining how you're not suggesting that?

That was my reaction too: a squirty swastika.

>[warning: cannot be unseen]

Everyone, please look at the FedEx logo. notice the arrow between the E and x? You're welcome.

I'm hoping the difference is that Fedex actually meant to do that ;)

It is [1]

> If you put a lower-case "x" to the right of a capital "E" (Ex) you can begin to see a hint of an arrow, though it is clumsy and extremely abstract. I thought that, if I could develop this concept of an "arrow" it could be promoted as a symbol for speed and precision, both FedEx communicative attributes. [...] Once I decided to refine the concept of the embedded arrow, I found that, to make the arrow more legitimate and identifiable, one needed to actually reconstruct the letterforms in order to make the arrow happen.

[1] http://www.thesneeze.com/secrets-of-the-fedex-logo/

Now I can't unsee.

My “problem” with the FedEx arrow is that I usually see it while passing a truck that’s in the right lane, so the arrow is pointing backwards.

That's a pricey oof. Hope they kept the receipt.

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