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Comment by Scene_Cast2 | Hacker News Reader

I might be in the minority, but the NeXT logo never looked good to me - there's something off with projection of the cube.

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Since Steve Jobs is no longer with us to say it, I'll fill in for him. You're holding your head wrong.

It's not just you. I don't think it works either. It's memorable, so that's good, but I don't think its flexible and I can't see it working below a certain size.

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.

You’re not. To me the Next logo is primitive and void of creativity. The GameCube logo easily surpasses it in every category. Additional points go to the animation of the GameCube logo.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ksZh-FHuKpk

I feel like it’s only good by collective agreement rather than any underlying merit. I wonder how many people would like it if they were told it was an idea a junior PM had put together as a holding pattern for a never-released Google product. Would it get the same level of adoration?

back in the day, during a talk about Westinghouse, we were all admiring Rand's striking and iconic Westinghouse Logo, the theory and precision behind it.

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.

Well, if a little boy said it, might as well agree with him!

I feel like the difference between art and design is that you shouldn't need to know any of the back story for design, it should just look right, even if the lay person can't quite tell you why it looks right. Nobody needs the backstory on the Nike tick. You don't need to be told that the lines on the FedEx logo are beautifully balanced.

> You don't need to be told that the lines on the FedEx logo are beautifully balanced.

What lines?

The ones that form the embedded arrow.

Never understood the hype around that.

Because it looks like a little chess king, instead of anything to do with Westinghouse or electronics?

Yep and it's not just the cube projection. It was in not a very good contrast with the futuristic elegance of the machine. First time I saw a NeXT in person, the logo looked like a placeholder of some sort, glaringly out of place.

There's symbolism in it that necessitates the angles that were used. It's a Great Work Black Cube (obvious), containing the life coil / ouroboros (the way the word wraps around on the second line), that runs The Next Step (represented by the 2D axial tilt — ever read Crowley? [0]), plus two-down-one-up / two-become-one (iykyk)

[0] https://archive.org/details/CrowleyTheBookOfTheLaw/page/n3/m...

It's fugly and orientation is messed up; the weird angle is OCD-triggering. They should just have taken the square with the "NEXT" letters, rotated it so that it's straight. Would be a lot better.

the goal of a logo is to be memorable, not just "look good"

I remember it looked terrible and unmemorable. Really, if you asked me 5 minutes ago to draw it I’d be unable to. I only remembered it was some sort of ugly use of the NeXT characters.

Apparently people’s response to it is polarizing. I always thought it was a ridiculously bad logo.

the fact that you can even remember its shape and ugly colors is remarkable, considering this is a product that was never widely used and hasn't been sold since 1997

I didn’t remember its shape or colors. Did I say otherwise?

The colors are ugly, there are too many of them, and the font is too thin so the letters don’t contrast enough with the background. It makes the whole thing look dingy and poorly lit. I think it’s instructive that nothing Apple did after Steve returned looks anything like this logo.

It's not just you. The e always annoyed me. It's just... not right.

The logo as a whole is supposed to be fun, creative, and polished, but there's something dissonant and slightly abrasive about it.

Maybe because it is an orthographic projection and not a perspective one.

I like orthographic projections, but this isn't one. The square at the top has perfect 90* corners, despite the "depth" (and thus being viewed from the side). Orthographic projections of a square squish it into a rhombus.

Good catch! Maybe that is the disconnect! I see close to ortho. Closer to ortho than it is anything else, but it just is not an ortho projection.

It is (almost) orthographic and people apparently expect perspective of some kind, or want to see a proper projection.

That is the cube clash as I see it.

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