The consultants must have been high-fiving each other after that one landed, it's like trading in your car only to find that the saleswoman has sold you your own car back, at a profit.
(SGI later collapsed due to "Corporate Campus Syndrome", and other companies, including Google, now occupy the wacky buildings they spent even more money on. It's kind of like a higher order of hermit crab).
* University of Portsmouth
* The University of Portsmouth
* Portsmouth University
[1] Yes, that's not -exactly- an acronym
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
It's not an initialism, like IBM, but it is an acronym, like Benelux.
Why would a superficial similarly to "MIT" be any be useful?
Any potential student should be able to look past that.
Guess it was for English only
That said, SGI had an iconic logo of a cube formed from a single periodic pipe before. I was using SGIs daily at the time and I almost cried when they did the rebrand.
The rebrand replaced it with a contemporary (at the time, mind you) typography logo that would look outdated if the compamy still existed.
To their credit, the rebrand did include a typeface design for use with all their design, i.e. detached from the logo.
The resp. fonts would have the aforementioned issues though -- one variant was used for the logo which is kinda cheap.
But at least they had a tyepface designed and it was recognizable. That rarely happens. Commonly a rebrand will just swap the old typeface for something different but already existing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#/media/File%3...
Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky. It also would have been expensive to reproduce well on letterhead, and I wouldn’t dare think of how that looked on photocopies (often monochrome at the time)
Now, could they have stylized/simplified the old logo and keep it nice? I wouldn’t know.
Now this is just silly. By 1999 most web users had at least True Color displays at SVGA if not XGA. While VGA resolutions with 256 colors were a design consideration those users were not the norm.
With that said, the old SGI looked just fine even at 256 colors. The shape was distinctive and it was all grayscale so 256 color palettes had all the colors needed for the logo with little noticeable dithering. There were even good 1-bit versions that were very distinctive.
The old SGI logo was cast in plastic as a 2.5D version on the workstations, color printed in color brochures and otherwise there was a much simplified black and white version.
It's sad what happened to them, as in their prime they really were a category of their own.
I remember sneaking over to their cafeteria, from the Landings office park across the street (where I did stints at some startups). They didn't bother to check badges. I met up with a bunch of old cow-orkers from Apple and just kind of hemmed and hawed when they asked what group I was in. :-)
But the lessons are clear: Watch your competitors carefully, and don't build a stupid corporate campus because the gods simply hate that kind of hubris.
They built single big machines and gave away the best swag. The leather jacket, in particular, was coveted.