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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

It's absolutely OK for people to be negative. Ive isn't reading this. He's not some downtrodden underdog that we should root for. He's arguably the most famous non-clothing designer in the world. We can and should critique his work and, if it's bad, rip it to shreds.

This looks like it would be a nice pattern for cross-stitching. It doesn't have any qualities that make it succeed as a logo.

To prove my point: try to remember and draw any part of this logo after it leaves your screen. Do you even remember the name of the company? Could you read that name at a glance?

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It’s more that most of the comments aren’t discussing the new logo and also contributing nothing new to industrial design discussions.

To answer your statement and question, this would actually be a poor cross-stitch due to the angles and intricate overlaps, but it’s a good seal. Understanding that it’s a seal, and not a logo, is key here—the logo is Sustainable Markets Initiative’s and follows the design principles you’re invoking in your comment.

The name on the seal, Terra Cotta, is presented clearly and memorably enough in large letters in the center of the seal, but the field of the seal is meant to look like a light or dark green disk at a glance and to reward more careful examination with details. The English and Latin arranged traditionally around the perimeter are mottos and not meant to be marketing keywords.

Interested in your take, given that. You can see it placed in context of the SMI brand here. https://www.sustainable-markets.org/terra-carta-seal/intro/

Terra Carta :) Autocorrect, perhaps?

Hah! Nice. :)

Oh no, the animals are animated and flying around. Terrible!

Those (presumably unintentionally) reminded me of an old Jason Rohrer game, Cultivation. You had to sort of tend to a garden that would produce five generations of bugs.

http://cultivation.sourceforge.net/

I'm not saying the logo should be left unchallenged. It's more so that the top comments at the time were all complaining about Apple's design direction and ascribing it all to Ive as if he's some horrid aesthetics anti-Christ who wrecked the company. Which first, is besides the point of this logo, and second, is ignoring his vast body of successful work.

Criticizing the logo is valid, but rehashing the same over-dramatic conversation about Ive is not worth the digital ink.

> It's more so that the top comments at the time were all complaining about Apple's design direction and ascribing it all to Ive as if he's some horrid aesthetics anti-Christ who wrecked the company.

Have you ever bought a poorly-designed $2,000 device? Apple products can inspire deep, personal anger in a way that other brands can't because they're expensive and the company's leadership was a combination of oblivious and smug about user-hostile decisions.

Look at the touch bar: it ruined generations of some people's favorite laptops. Ive isn't the anti-Christ, but it's frustrating seeing someone so lauded after making some unbelievably bad design decisions and then stubbornly sticking to them.

It may not make sense to you, but Ive's work is very personal to some people (on both the good and bad ends of the spectrum).

I mean I own quite a few Apple products. I wouldn't call them poorly-designed per se. Okay, the Touch Bar was a truly awful feature and I'll admit I don't love it. Other than that, I've liked my Apple products. I've also struggled to find any alternative to Apple that comes close. What invokes deep, personal anger for me isn't Apple's products, but the sheer amount of ugly, bad design outside of Apple's sphere. I don't want to get into a rant about this, because as I've stated before, this argument has been rehashed endlessly, but it's incredible that in this day, no company comes close in design and aesthetic.

If you're going to be furious at Jony Ive for the Macbook Pro, why not be angry at his competitors who can't seem to make a credible competitor? And if that is incorrect and there is a credible competitor, why not buy it and ignore Apple?

I think you're talking about the full universe of Apple products, while I was talking only about the specific things Ive enforced (like the touch bar). Now that Ive is gone, Macbooks are no-compromise machines again (if you ignore that they're difficult to repair).

> it's incredible that in this day, no company comes close in design and aesthetic

Lots of companies shamelessly mimic Apple, so there are plenty of smartphones and laptops that are equally nice to look at.

I think it boils down to your priorities, too. A lot of people still use and love hideous Lenovo Thinkpad laptops that are highly functional. They have the trackpad and the "nub" for a mouse -- something Apple would likely find appallingly redundant, but is the thing that makes people love Thinkpads.

On the other side, there are people who use aging Macbook Airs from years ago, even though they're incredibly slow.

But all this aside, what I'm saying that Ive did was make enforce design decisions that were hostile to users across the spectrum (again, Touch Bar and USB-C-only notebooks are the easiest examples).

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