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Comment by drno123 | Hacker News Reader

The Apple “rainbow” logo is timeless. SGI cube logo was fantastic. NeXT logo? I never understood all the buzz around it, to me it is no better than original colorful Windows logo.

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The SUN logo is very clever: splitting the "S" into two "U" characters that can be read as "U" and "N".

The Sydney Australia office had this on a large steel cube out the front.

Clever, but it's not very easy to read or understand intuitively, so I wouldn't rate it very high as a logo.

I don't think highly of the NeXT logo either, but this comment on the article makes a good argument:

"Considering how well recognized the NeXT logo is in the industry even though it was a minor company with barely any market, the logo is as remarkable as their products were"

The Steve Jobs effect. That's why the logo became famous.

I have the same reaction. I think that as consumers of media, we hear about Next through the history of Steve Jobs' career and the history of Apple, and media about those subjects is all over the place. I've never seen it out in the world, or encountered some salient cultural reference it was attached to, or saw it in anything outside of its status as a chapter in the history of Apple.

NeXT was also the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser, and on which Carmack wrote Doom. Not bad for a platform far smaller than SGI or Sun I'd say.

Minor company? Maybe financially, but they developed what is now called iOS and macOS.

I think a lot of people who are interested in computing history know about them.

My favorite computer logo was the original Amiga checkmark:

https://i1.wp.com/www.geekometry.com/wp-content/uploads/2015...

I completely agree, and I don't understand what, aside from its historical significance, people can point to that suggest it was a good logo. I think it's a little visually complicated, I don't think the colors harmonize, it's not transcendentally simple like the Apple logo or the Nike swish, the choice of font and arrangement of letters isn't doing anything for me. and I'd like to think that I'm the type of person that would be receptive to rationales for why logos are the way they are. Not that I'm an expert, but I followed conversations on flag design, I've read about the Twitter and Pepsi logo redesigns, the Obama icon, etc.

The best rationale that I can think of is that it looks like an artifact of outdated 90s design, but was produced in the 80s, and so was in a sense ahead of its time, which counts for something, at least.

Rand would argue it looks dated because NeXT is dated. It’s a relic. The logo reflects the association to the reality, that is, NeXT is an old idea from yesteryear.

Sourceish: https://youtu.be/Ta4ef1xBeMA

Next’s logo was sort of like if Apple’s logo had changed to a black phone rectangle and colorful app icons when the iPhone was announced. Next’s identity was intended to match its strong vision of the future of computing as well as the creative expression it would enable within both the company and its future customers. And the logo has been validated as a powerful symbol over time, though granted it can be hard to isolate praise for it from praise for Jobs.

Both Windows and NeXT logos are awesome to me. One of the best ever.

There were many iterations of the Windows logo. I am not a design buff at all but the ones from the 90s look pretty bad now IMHO. The tail of icons and all that...

I am not a huge fan of some of the UI from Win8 and Win10 but the logo looks a bit nicer than it used to.

The Windows 1.0 logo [0] from 1985 looks shockingly modern to me: flat, negative space, recognizable in small and low fidelity reproductions. It was seemingly used until v3.1, when MS ruined the metaphor with the weird waving flag.

The Sun Microsystems logo [1] is much-loved, but can never get too much credit imho.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems

That's funny, that windows 1.0 logo does look pretty modern, but it also has a distinctly 80s feel. I feel every year though, 80s fashion and aesthetics are coming back in more and more parts of life.

Well, imagine if NeXT became Apple. I would guarantee people would be obsessed with the backstory and some even thinking that a good logo is the magic bullet needed to win

I thought the same thing until I saw it on a Next computer. The colorful little square brings a glint of playful personality to an otherwise-serious-looking black cube.

Which came first? I assume that the logo wouldn’t have been designed without knowing what the product looked like, but I could be wrong.

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