Slack’s New Logo Became a Lightning Rod For Bad Things on The Internet | Hacker News Reader

Slack’s New Logo Became a Lightning Rod For Bad Things on The Internet

buzzfeednews.com

14 pointsminimaxir12 comments

Why did they redesign it at all? The old logo references the character that indicates channel names. Perfectly reasonable for a chat app. Now that they are going public maybe they should change the logo to “$” so people know the company has changed focus.

Also it’s frustrating they call the new logo an “octothorpe” because that’s a name of the “#” character they used for their previous logo.

Apparently this was designed by the same people who came up with the uninspired “H” logo for Hillary in 2016. My initial reaction to that was “a shift to the right”. Which may actually align with Clinton’s moderate political views but was probably the wrong message.

According to Slack, because it looked better on more backgrounds: https://slackhq.com/say-hello-new-logo

It would look better if they left it on a white background, but it's constantly on a purple one and it looks so amateurish.

Does Slack ever refer to the new logo as an octothorpe? If you read their blog post, they say the old one is an octothorpe, but I don't think they apply any shape name to their new logo.

I think it might just be that the author of this article misread/misunderstood Slack's post and didn't know what an octothorpe was.

This trend of having new logos twisted into something repulsive may not be only a social or social media trend.

Perhaps it is also the result of the current design fashion to create ever more abstract logos, seeking some ideal abstractions of the company/product's value proposition.

The thing is, the more abstract a graphic is, the more open it is to new, and often repulsive, viewings.

The original 1976 Apple logo [1] could not redily be mistaken or recast for much of anything other than Newton about to be hit on the head with an apple. The following logos are also pretty clearly the fruit, although the current one is getting pretty abstract.

By the time you get to Slack's new logo, well, it's sufficiently abstract as to be essentially a Rorschach Inkblot Test -- anybody can overlay anything they want, and on Twitter, they will.

Also, in these days of rapid change, adding yet another change, particularly to workplace items (as mentioned in the article), is just another piece of cognitive load that people don't need, and so will be a source of irritation, not pleasure.

Tread carefully...

[1] http://www.graphicart-news.com/interview-with-rob-janoff-the...

This largely seems like the fluff from a bored internet.

Buzzfeed is usually a good source for "fluff from a bored internet".

I will never understand "People are Mad on Twitter" stories

This seems to be most of what twitter is, like 1/3rd of it is anger, manufactured outrage, or or some sort of virtue signaling related outrage.

No, it's hard hitting journalism from Buzzfeed.

I don't feel good about the surprisingly large number of "if you complain about the Slack logo you don't care about justice or the welfare of others" takes.

I stand by the idea that the worst thing about the new logo is that it's not angled anymore. Even just tilting the new logo looks better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com