An iterative look at logo / icon design | Hacker News Reader

An iterative look at logo / icon design

blog.yobongo.com

59 pointsrandall30 comments

This is a beautiful icon, but I'm going to risk saying something unpopular here. This is less a design exercise than it is an application of current design trends. Linen textures, subtle gradients, noisy gradients, glowing text—even the controversial iTunes 10 glow—are all everywhere. And while they look cool, they do nothing to distinguish your brand from anyone else following the same trends.

Some people may prefer a "beautiful" icon to a clever icon. I sure don't.

Unity3D is a great example. Their logo isn't especially pretty, but it's iconic and it fits the product perfectly. And, it doesn't seem especially trendy, or dated — I guess that means it's timeless. http://unity3d.com/

I don't understand how that icon isn't beautiful.

It's pretty and it gives you a good idea what the product and company do.

A logo can be beautiful (appealing) just because it is clever (well designed), but it won't necessarily be clever just because it is beautiful.

But then, I still agree with tmgrhm in that Unity3D is both beautiful and clever.

Brushed Metal and Glow is the new Individualized Helvetica Nameplate on Stark White Paper (Just Like Everyone Else). It's hopelessly derivative and is rapidly having its meaning and impact sucked dry. It's also a pretty effective signal for (1) I hired a designer because (2) this is a high quality Mac/iOS application.

I don't really have a problem with it and it kicks the pants off an icon that didn't get that kind of workup in terms of visceral Polish, but as others have noted, it pretty much tells no story of the app at all. I'm not even interested enough to click on their header and learn.

That's fine though. Commodity design doesn't have to have an impact, and I prefer a world where commodity design is valuable and practiced over one where people just don't care.

I would prefer a world where people take risks attempting to forge their iconography with meaning at the expense of stylistic visual polish, to one where hollow aesthetics are seen as an alternative to ugliness.

As would I, but the harsh reality seems to be that the demand is not direct enough to support that kind of effort. That intangible "passion" is not extrinsically motivated, and mass audience isn't willing to forgo convenience in the search of it.

Terrible logo for getting actual downloads- implies nothing about what the app does.

With App Store marketing you have to describe your app with just the title and logo. By punting on logo you're losing 50% of your descriptive levers for getting rank traffic.

Some context to back the authoritativeness of Colin's statement:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745858

http://spreadsong.com/icon_driven_development_on_the_app_sto...

After reading that blog post I checked out the company and saw... another bookshelf icon?

http://spreadsong.com/

Tried to find more info, but the Spreadsong blog seems to be MIA without a direct link to a specific entry.

We changed it six months ago- once we were able to afford the design talent to make a good go of it.

http://cl.ly/3O3H300K3C3p423G2i2Z

It's another bookshelf icon, but the colors and style make it stand out in the app store listings.

Key is to stand out relative to competition, in the common ways users find your app.

Downloads and sales have more than doubled since the change, though we also redesigned the app interface itself in the same update.

I might be biased as one of the cofounders, but I find that the Yobongo icon stands out pretty well relative to the myriad of blue-ish icons.

http://i.imgur.com/VtYUJ.png

The strong border sets the icon apart, and in fact I notice that you have a similar border in your icon!

The app is about chatting with people near you. First of all, that's been done before...many times, and it has not worked yet. Secondly, if they are spending so much time & money on just an icon, and ending up with an icon that does not work well in the app store, then they clearly have no clue what they are doing.

Am I the only one to think that icons that prominently feature a letter to represent the app aren't very... iconic? Is this from the school of thought that gave rise to Adobe's adoption of their new "icons"?

Thankfully this pattern seems to be more rule than exception. Very few of the icons in my Dock have letters (or glyphs) in them at all. Notably, Skype uses a big S in some circle-y kinda thing, X11 has the "X" and Angband uses some vaguely Asian-looking thing.

Checklist for a powerful brand:

1) An icon where the name of the object depicted in the icon is the name of the company or product. 2) A company/product name that's also a common noun, but not so common that search results for the noun overpower search results for the company/product. Depends on the prominence of the product/company, of course. 3) A domain name that is the exact company/product name.

Eg: Apple.

Good luck finding something that matches these requirements!

I'm half-joking, of course. In all seriousness, I 100% agree with you. Icons should be graphic, not textual. They should be expressive, not descriptive.

This is all style with no substance.

Looking at the icon, I have no clue what it's for.

Style with no substance: isn't that what's "hot" right now?

A Y in a box. I wonder if they considered doing it in orange?

It would have helped to see the mobile icon in context (ie, on an iPhone homepage or dock/shelf)... hard to see the faults with the brightness without seeing the "pudding".

I find it interesting that so many top-tier social offerings leverage various shades of blue (facebook, twitter, yammer, linkedin). There are multiple psychology discussions (color theory, herd mentality, etc.) in there somewhere.

To be honest, at first glance I was reminded of Yammer's iPhone icon. But I think this treatment stands on its own.

Very much like Yobongo publicly discussing their brand's visual evolution.

This is a great infographic for an overview of the prominent colors of the web: http://static.colourlovers.com.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/imag...

The light, muted blue gives a relaxed and calm impression of the interface.

I always hated the reddish brown Ubuntu interface. The color was very intense, and after several hours of real work I could feel flash burns :)

Blue is also cold and is also associated with "clean", making associations with the "future" natural (e.g. ultraviolet lights, robots, etc...); in contrast red is associated with getting help, humans or feelings.

Visual balance.. The Y is too far left. You could have started with the simple and effective version you ended up with, not the "clever-negative-space" one. Abstraction provides better results when you have something to take away from. See if you can get an interesting result going the other way (removing instead of adding) from your current final design.

Paul Rand designed the famous NeXT logo for Steve Jobs — do you think Steve made one change to it? No. http://www.paul-rand.com

I read that Paul Rand said (something to the effect of) a great logo could be drawn in sand with your finger and still be recognizable.

All of his logos had that! In fact I think a real good test of a brand is if you can blur the logo and still recognize it. Of course part of that is the ability to saturate the mass media with your brand — and Rand was part of that golden age.

Congrats to having the guts to drop the reflections! They may seem sexy on the first sight, but make the icons unsuitable for long term usage.

Continuous iteration towards continuous improvement! That final logo design is very good and clean.

Nice logo design. :)

Neeraj Agarwal

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