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Comment by tvanantwerp | Hacker News Reader

This feels so generic. I get the problem they're referencing with too many colors and not working in all contexts. But the human mind being what it is, I never had a problem connecting "rainbow-colored #" with "Slack". This...this is just some kind of blob. I couldn't tell this apart from a big pharma company, or some kind of conglomerate that makes everything from toasters to jet planes. I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria, even as far as a generic colorful squarish logo. It's gone from "# means Slack" to "I guess that's Slack...?"

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^THIS.

It does feel generic. I'm actually retroactively impressed that the old one looked so classy using so many colors (pour one out for https://metalab.co, who is doing just fine). I actually loved the different treatments—the Slack brand always felt like one of their strongest assets. It looks like the Joomla logo now – https://www.joomla.org/

Agreed, the '#' had a long history of indicating a channel, like on IRC, and by extension text-based communication.

And for those not familiar with IRC, the association of "#" with Twitter hashtags says "communication" too.

And for those not familiar with early Twitter, the hashtag was not a feature of the platform, but a shorthand way to indicate a topic. This of course was recognized and formalized by Twitter soon after, but I find it fascinating that it was a feature essentially developed by the users and more simply recognized by the platform later.

> a shorthand way to indicate a topic

And I imagine it was also inspired by IRC channels.

100% slack is essentially evolved irc.

The part I quoted was about Twitter, not Slack. Slack's relation to IRC was already mentioned. Essentially, my comment was "Not just Slack, Twitter too was inspired by IRC."

I'd bet that quite a lot of early Twitter users were also IRC users.

99 Percent Invisible did a whole show on this a while back: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/

It was nice homage to what they were ripping off, I mean modernizing.

This - the # wasn't a random choice for slack. And there's no shame in that.

To add to the generic feel they've changed the font for "slack" to be very similar to the fonts used by every other tech company ever.

going through a "rebrand" is not something most companies undertake lightly.

> I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria

IIRC that rebrand was done to distance the company from cancerous associations with the name "Philip Morris", whereas the only reason I can think of for Slack to do this now is to give them a quick short-term publicity boost to make them more relevant to "retail investors" -- that is, this corroborates rumors of a public offering later this year, and imho means that it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

It looks like a # woven out of thread that changes color when it ducks underneath.

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