Windows 10 Desktop: Physically building and photographing the logos (2015)
gmunk.com
gmunk.com
The piece doesn't become better because it was all done by hand. In fact, they kind of ruined it by cleaning it up so much that it looks like just another stock digital creation. If they had left it 'analog' looking, maybe it would have looked cool. Maybe.
Seems like someone needed to burn through a big budget and then come up with reasons why. As always, this needs a reference to the classic Pepsi logo design case.
This was what disappointed me the most. They went to all that trouble to be able to take a photograph of a physical object then modified it so much that it ended up looking like a generic render from a Windows forum.
While the XP wallpaper is obviously iconic my personal favourites were the ones with Windows 7. They had many weird and wonderful ones in that collection :)
This is really a good demonstration of the law of diminishing returns relative to art. Sometimes less is more. A more complicated and weird process doesn't always, and in fact very rarely, increases the value of the output work.
Context?
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
I can virtually guarantee a designer knocked up a few variants, the creative director said “Oh, this looks nice”, and they made up a long and on-brand pitch deck to send to the client.
Even worse is the timeline figure (page 19). It seems to suggest that if some of those historical events had happened on different dates then the exact measurements on the Pepsi logo would be different. Do you actually believe that? It's clearly complete bullshit.
Almost every single figure is contrived nonsense that reveals more about the authors' stupidity than the logo.
The first thing I do in Windows is replace the background image with a solid black
Windows 10 bg is kinda depressing on a rainy gloomy day. Seattle is like that for almost half the year.
How can I replace my tired light-blue Windows logo with the red/magenta logo they show? I like the richer colors.
https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5bf94ef89317938c80bb...
1. Click on the logo that you prefer. 2. Right click -> save as 3. In windows explorer, right click on the image -> set as desktop background
As for the reason why - I think it’s to do with users using high-res photos (like 10megapixel) as wallpapers which would bog Windows down if used as-is - and users on roaming profiles causing a 10MB+ BMP image bring copied over the network every time they logon. Probably. I speculate.
HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\JPEGImportQuality -> 100There’s a way you could say the same thing without being weird. “Swapping” would have sufficed!
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/05/when-tv-logos-were-ph...
My second impression, watching the lead designer speak, is that his job is more than 50% about bullshiting. I.e. you design something that is passable, and then give an elaborate story, full of emotions and grandiose ideas, that make it easier for the decision makers to OK it - they in turn need the story to justify their decision (esp. if some higher ups question it later). Man, corporate world has so many people doing pseudo-work and playing out their bullshit roles in exchange for a comfortable middle-class life. I'm so glad I'm almost out.
Certainly in the world of modern art it's often all about process and little about the art itself. But most people watching the result when they log into Windows don't know or care about this.
This could have been done by a single artist in a VFX software, art directed by gmunk.
But as they say: “If all you know is a hammer ...” ;)
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2012/02/17/redes...
Looks like this has now been corrected in the latest update.
Works fine but you can still see the pattern with some graphics or backgrounds, and it only burned in for a few dozen hours before I noticed it.
Sure, you could recreate this in GCI but it would be way harder to come up with the design in the first place.
I would also consider, any GCI artist could recreate this in 3D, but few could create it from scratch. If we consider that there was an good artist hired to do this piece, then it will be up to artist to choose his/her medium and you are critizing choice of artist or saying artist how to do his creative process and it is not about real vs GCI anymore.
Creating stuff from scratch is really really hard, it is always better to combine and build on things. The final product will look more original, detailed and overall better.
Art is messy, not optimized process.
And here, it's easy to say that you could easily produce this in CG using Blender and the like, if the artist knew what the final image would look like. But the final image is the product of the experimental process, which invited different possibilities to playing around with digital tools. An art teacher once told me, 'There's no right and wrong in art, just good and shit.' And 'good works of art', by my definition, tend to have a development process behind them, and not just whims of fraudulent genius, as some might believe.
In practical sense, yes, you can do it really fast, easy and cheap with any 3D software nowadays in just 2 days(but where's the fun in that?:) IMO, easily created things are also easily forgettable.
Another example is Apple and some of their recent desktop/iPhone wallpaper. It seems like CG, but those are real piece of art, made by hand, and photographed. Google's Material design concept, with real light and shadow, comes to mind too. Seems overkill?, yes, but it did has story behind it and not cheaply made in 2 hours with Adobe illustrator. The nonsense, abstract and intangibility part of it is what differentiate the brand. You will never see utilitarian brand like Amazon do something like this.
By deciding that the windows logo should be a studio photo they also made a statement about taking all pieces of the project seriously.
Moreover like for Google's material design, constraints are often the source of creativity.
CGI is still not the same. Yet.
CG can certainly look excellent when the effort is put in (a lot is done on the cheap these days) but there is a time and a place for models if you want that feel.
Would be interested in seeing someone try to recreate the feel of models in CG though by literally modelling a model set/scale in CG.
But yes, I love the Star Wars and LOTR (Wetaworks) stuff.
(1) https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/stranger-things-almost-had-som...
Sure, the effort is wasted on some, but the most important users love it.
The animated version is pretty neat to look at only because you know it's not VFX. The effect itself is nothing to write home about.
LG did something similar too, but to be honest, it appears they basically re-drew it digitally anyway.
What should the budget be for something like this?
I've been lucky enough to know professional creative people who are very good at their jobs, and the one quality they share is the ability to produce work that is somehow reassuringly effective.
It's like they can give an audience the gift of just believing in what they do. There's no need for cynicism or questions - the work just works, and you can relax into it.
I don't think this is on that level. There's something awkward and self-conscious about it, so it doesn't quite gel or pop like it should. It's both too controlled and too messily out of control (lasers? acrylic? light projection? kitchen sink?) at the same time.
It's only about the money in the sense that there seems to have been a lot of it, and it's not obvious why.
I could probably do this in an hour or two, including the fog (which really makes the image) - probably sounds condescending, but I cannot emphasize enough about the triviality of generating this wallpaper in CG. Most people don't realize what today's CG software can do, just look at the new features in Houdini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIcUW9QFMLE
I think people get used to seeing CGI so much they simply get used to it. Take the faces in frozen, they are intentionally stylized but in a way that looks utterly freakish. It’s not even that the animators messed up. Somehow rather than people seeing something deep in the uncanny valley most people simply don’t have a problem with this kind of distortion.
Yes you could recreate this in a few hours but cannot create this in a few hours. That's the big difference.
> [original_posting] looks good, but didn't get much attention. Would you care to repost it? You can do so here: [repost_link].
> ... the software will give the repost an upvote from the mods, plus we'll make sure it doesn't get flagged.
> This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you have any questions, let us know. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again.
As you can see, my posting started out with a whole one extra vote and thus the system was completely gamed. You were right :)
/s [edit: email is real]
Then, long text to say: we took a colored projector and black scotch and voilà.
No explanation of why it would be better than doing it digitally. And most of it, the technique is far from new and they did a very basic thing with it. Some people mix lights to create images and all.
My point is that if it was not related to something famous (Microsoft), no one would have cared
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
HN's archives contain tons of good articles that fall through the cracks because they didn't get noticed on /newest. Giving some of those a second chance is one way to make HN more interesting, which is what we try to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Another word for "optimization" might be "interference"—it depends on your perspective. Without moderation (plus software), HN's content would consist mostly of the same few hot topics over and over, plus sensational stories and riler-uppers. Unregulated, the system optimizes itself not for curiosity but for indignation. That alas is what mass psychology is wired for. Moderators' job is to bump the system out of these failure modes when it ends up in them.
We try to be careful not to overdo it—our job is not to impose things on the community so much as to sense what it likes and provide more ways for it to have that. It's not our personal tastes that govern second-chance selections so much as our guess at what the community might find interesting. They get a brief placement on the front page. If we guess wrong, and the community doesn't find them interesting, they soon fall off. This post wasn't a wrong guess though—it was a rarer case where the community was split. Enough users liked it to upvote it to the top, while a bunch of other users didn't, and the thread contains comments from both camps.
You can see a partial list of second-chance posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are ones that were too old to put directly in the second-chance pool, so we emailed the submitter with a repost invitation instead. At some point we'll publish a more comprehensive list of all the stories that got given a second chance, but this one is representative.
The holy grail of all this is to build software for the community to do all this instead. That would be perfect because first, it would no longer be just moderators and story reviewers doing it, but anyone who wants to. And second, it would be way less work for us! So that's definitely the plan. What we still haven't come up with is a way to do it that isn't somehow just a reimplementation of the voting system—which HN has already got one of. One extra aspect of this is that when we get there, it should be a nice new way for users to earn karma on the site. The user who finds an old submission that the community turns out to love, will get karma for it, in addition to the submitter.
By the way, if you or anyone runs across a submission that is particularly good and didn't get attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the pool. We love getting these emails! Especially when they're something someone else posted and you just ran across it and found it interesting.
There are many times that interesting stories are submitted but never happen to hit the right window on /new to get upvoted onto the front page.
One of the things the mods look for is interesting articles that have been submitted by multiple people and still never made it to the front page. That is a sign that there may be community interest. My guess is that they have a script to find these articles, and then review them manually. Then they email the first person to have submitted it and ask them to re-submit.
Daniel (dang) explained this in more detail on another "second chance" article earlier today:
I see it as mostly Dan realizing that people might find it interesting. And the votes seem to suggest he was right.
Throwing something back into /new isn't gaming the system, and there's no reason why 'dang shouldn't get a vote as well. At minimum it's curation, at maximum it's just a retry with 'dang upmodding it.
I say this as a person who read the post, didn't like it, thought about making a snarky comment about how the first time I saw it I thought the person's screen was covered in smudges, and refrained.