What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
paulrand.design
paulrand.design
> The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/117842715/where-did-t...
I followed your link expecting to see some hack work, and I guess technically it is hack work, but that "ballot box" thing really works.
ugh.
I explored the law. Cutting a long story short I figured out a way in which one could (legally) hire someone to pop around to Gould’s house in the middle of the night and go through his bins the night before bin day. For roughly a year I read many documents from the Blair inner circle including notes from Blair. Many of them were market research about the euro. I saw Gould writing memos for Blair who would try out ideas (remember ‘the bridge between Europe and America’?) then Gould tested the results. I tried to counter these moves but, obviously, without being able to tell people that my ‘hunches’ about what Blair was up to were not hunches. For a few thousand quid a month I had a window into the Government’s secret plans.
Guess he didn't get the "gentlemen do not read each other's mail" memo - may not be a gentleman at all ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI
(Bass would return a mere 13 years later to do the AT&T "Death Star" logo after the breakup)
Like, just look at that one sign overlooking the east river in NYC. That logo’s gonna be around forever.
They found a way around the sign problem. All they have to do is change the V, and remove the checkmark. —_—
They are, nevertheless, required by business types to come up with some sort of justification, and that's what you just read. It doesn't matter whether it's truthful or accurate, so long as it's plausible from a business perspective.
Huh. Never knew why the 'e' was lowercased until now. I thought it was just "style".
LO
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People don't realize that a logo is an empty vessel that is filled with the peoples experiences of the company and product, it has to be the correct vessel. People online see a logo for the first time and judge it without any knowledge of the company or product, which is fine but not really helpful. Interact with the company and product and then judge the logo after time has passed.
I wonder what his thoughts were re: political logos, like the Communist Hammer & Sickle and the Nazi Swastika.
A little boy pointed at it and said "That logo is dumb."
And it was at that instant that we all suddenly realized that it was a pretty bad logo. We moved on to the next topic quickly after that.
What lines?
Apparently people’s response to it is polarizing. I always thought it was a ridiculously bad logo.
The NeXT logo is, like everything, a product of it's time. It would have had to evolve, just like the Apple logo. It's just that the apple with a bit taken out had a recognisable shape, which Apple have kept. NeXT would have had to transition as much as Microsoft has, because the Paul Rand design is so locked to that specific period in time. It's both the colors and the shape, where the Apple logo is just the colors. Maybe they could lose the writing and the colors, but then it just look like a Transformer faction.
The NeXT logo is interesting as an anachronism, forever locked in the early 90s, with no evolution, due to Apple buying the company.
The logo as a whole is supposed to be fun, creative, and polished, but there's something dissonant and slightly abrasive about it.
[0] https://archive.org/details/CrowleyTheBookOfTheLaw/page/n3/m...
That is the cube clash as I see it.
Love to see it.
"There is nothing about the IBM symbol, for example, that suggests computers, except what the viewer reads into it. Stripes are now associated with computers because the initials of a great computer company happen to be striped."
Don't the 'stripes' in the IBM logo reflect a video display technology, such as CRT, with an electron gun refreshing in horizontal lines? I assumed the low resolution of the logo's stripes reflected the resolution - and therefore the text appearance - that people were used to seeing on computer screens at the time.
That was just ... weird.
Knowing how temperamental and petty Jobs was and seeing how excited he was about the logo and Rand, all others present simply had no choice but to praise it.
No way of knowing what they really thought about it.
https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-the-a...
At least we've moved on from the early releases where the Carbon Finder.app was a significant impact on memory, and the Java calculator app took multiple bounces to load Java and run.
I just wish that Apple would do something more meaningful than Sidecar so as to provide a stylus experience for Mac OS.
One of the most interesting developments that came out of the GNUstep world was Étoilé, which was developed in the late 2000s and looked like a promising rethinking of what a desktop powered by GNUstep technology could do. One impressive feature was its Smalltalk implementation, which brought NeXT technology “home” to its Smalltalk inspiration (NeXTstep can be thought of as a polished Smalltalk machine, with Objective-C and Unix in place of the Smalltalk language and runtime). Sadly Étoilé doesn’t appear to have been worked on in about a decade.
I know in recent years there’s been a major effort to get GNUstep’s API on par with the latest version of Apple’s Cocoa, increasing compatibility. Maybe GNUstep will finally become more popular one day, but I’m glad the project hasn’t died after all these years.
Haiku may not have a dynamic API like Cocoa/GNUstep, but it already has a well-designed desktop and it is capable of running BeOS binaries on x86 (but not x86-64), IIRC. From a desktop perspective, Haiku looks very promising; it’s finally almost ready for prime time.
I actually talked a co-worker at a previous job into using it (he was doing Mac OS X development at work, didn't have a Mac at home, and was able to use GNUstep for this after a fashion).
I do have a Linux box which I can use for it as well, and experimenting with it there is something I want to do now that my MacBook stopped supporting my Wacom One. My next tech purchase will be a Raspberry Pi 5, and I hope to experiment with GNUstep on it.
I guess it's better than its contemporary Windows 3 but Windows 95's start menu and taskbar seem far superior to me and I still prefer them to today's macOS Dock and top menu.
https://www.myfonts.com/products/pro-condensed-extra-black-1...
https://ia600906.us.archive.org/31/items/NeXTSTEP33CISC/NeXT...
I really like his redesign of the Ford logotype; although Ford doesn’t seem to have used it.
All sizzle, no steak.
It's also humorous to me that the designer was considering something that looks like an hour glass for the X. Imagine using a symbol for your powerful new computer that essentially means "wait".
Are you sure you're not mixing timelines? Was the hourglass established for this metaphor in 1986?
I first remember the hourglass cursor from Windows 95. At the time Macintosh used a wristwatch. This struck me as similar to Microsoft using "recycle bin" because they borrowed a metaphor and didn't want to say "trash".
It wouldn't surprise me to see earlier uses of the metaphor, but some quick googling is not immediately revealing them to me.
Edit: this claims Xerox Star used the hourglass. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wait-wait-tell-me/
PS I miss that watch! It was way better than the beachball.
Since the logo with the "hourglass" styling was never presented to NeXT, it was obvious that it wasn't considered a strong candidate to show as part of the design process for any number of reasons.
It's important to remember that brainstorming and sketching are just that. You're just trying to get all the ideas out there, you critique them afterwards. We usually do not see those sketches, so I wouldn't take them literally.
I assume that association is why Rand abandoned the concept, but the opposing arrows also represent a crossing-over / pulling-apart / creating-reality / 2D-becomes-3D / new-dimension kind of thing.
The eventual Mac OS X uses the same symbolism. I remember being irrationally annoyed back in the day at the way Stebe Jovs would pronounce it “Mac OS Ecks” instead of “Mac OS Ten”, and it took me like twenty years to realize that it is actually Mac OS Ecks — it's Mac OS Up + Down. Peep the negative space and you can see the arrowheads, plus the axial tilt and crossing-over encoded in the way one opposing arm and leg of the Garamond X are thicker: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joewhk/1805068540
I was quite disappointed and find it hard to say anything kind about it.
It works a lot better on Steve’s t-shirt where you can’t see the box.
Love the UX/UI design and styling. The cases. The logo. Everything.
The point? The thing is meaningless. It’s the story of the founder’s reaction and the cause and effect of the founder’s choices. The thing has no gravity in and of itself. It’s meaning entirely created and destroyed by the founder.
In the case of NeXT, it is literally the company rising and falling with the presence of the founder. The weight of any thing immediately diminished with founder’s departure. Nothing remained.
We shall see what happens with Apple. It may attain a new founder, or it may not.
Another possibly word for it seems to be the philosophy of megalomania: Their problem-solving and deep philosophical thinking yields the most basic, self-serving, egocentric outcome: More power, money, and credit for me. That's a pretty big dealbreaker for any rational examination, especially with any understanding of human nature and history.
What I don't understand is how followers of this philosophy overlook the obvious, basic, overwhelming flaw. How do you overlook that?
In a way it seems like the philosophy eats its own tail: Part of the modus operendi is the infinite con - endless agression, unlimited by any constraint, with the expectation that your opponents will be overwhelmed or exhausted, or at least perpetually surrender the initiative. SBF is a leading example, but we can name many more. Is the philosophy itself another infinite con?
Followers of sama? Simple: in it for the money. The only tangible philosophy that sticks ends up being greed combined with lying through the teeth.