Our Logo Looks Like Underpants: A Case Study in Internationalization | Hacker News Reader

Our Logo Looks Like Underpants: A Case Study in Internationalization

blog.rjmetrics.com

245 pointsjthandy110 comments

Post mentions Google Comsumer Surveys http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/pricing

at $0.10 for targeted and $0.50 for targeted (age , gender, etc) responses this seems like a great way for getting feedback quick. Has anyone got any experience doing them ? Does anyone know how these people answer surveys, is there a web portal for people to sign up to do them ?

I can't say what is is about your comment or the article, but something about the combination gives off the vibe that this is an astroturfing effort to promote Google Comsumer Surveys.

I've been a member here for over 4 years, I doubt I'd wait so long to promote a product.

I've seen them smack dab in the middle of boston.com "The Big Picture". You basically can't look at more than a few of the photos without answering a google survey question. For me, looking at this page now asks me who my auto insurance provider is with: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/10/broken_lives_of_fuk...

It must be blocked by AdBlock, because I've never seen one.

I'm realizing now I'm missing a pretty large part of the web, by using AdBlock and Ghostery: most social share buttons, ads, Disqus comments… I should probably go on the unadulterated web one day a month, just to see what it looks like.

I don't have adblock either and I haven't seen any. I'm probably not a target group for any survey.

Don't do it. The web is dark and full of terrors.

I've never seen these before. I disabled blocking and was, on my first load, presented with this:

http://i.imgur.com/aYE5GC7.png

Looks like Google embeds this survey directly into content on many sites, probably through AdSense tags?

I'm not sure, I don't think I've ever seen one.

Just did some more research, they have outlined a bit here http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/how sometimes it unlocks content (and the publisher gets a slip of the fee).

It seems that they somehow have you already targeted to a 10% accuracy level based on your search history.

Their case studies are also worth checking http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/use_cases

I'm a co-founder of Survata (YC S12) which also runs consumer surveys. We're lower cost than Google Consumer Surveys and give professional survey design advice for free. Email us at contact at survata and we'll hook you up with a Hacker News discount. :)

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/how

Why is that "take the tour" button so messed up?

Hey Xux,

What issue were you having with the "take the tour" button?

https://i.imgur.com/cLG7L5u.png

1366x768 screen resolution, same position on Chrome and Firefox.

Resizing the window and reverting to full screen again results in this:

https://i.imgur.com/zkK85tN.png

Which is below the original fold.

I would not have said pants to start with, but now its been said, all I can see is pants. [0]

Maybe this is more about the power of suggestion

0. UK, where pants is pants and not trousers. ;)

Edit: Also, pants is a UK way of saying rubbish. So, "that web site is a load of pants", might be said. Might be a sense of humor at work here.

I spilled some coffee on some light coloured trousers on the way to the London office. The stain was centered right in my lap and I couldn't really go around like that all day, so I stopped and bought some cheap trousers at Gap to sort me out.

Pro-tip: Telling your local UK colleagues that you were running late because you stained your pants and needed to get new pants, and then offering to show people the stained pants is going to lead to some awkward moments.

Ah, wonderfully divided by a common language!!!! :)

"Fanny" is a great cause of transatlantic fun too. And if you are a Brit in the US, never ever say, "Im diving out for a fag". You're gonna get some odd looks.

And British hosts, please don't offer to knock your American houseguests up in the morning, or any other time.

Fascinating fact: the phrase "knock up," as in awaken by knocking, comes from the industrial revolution, after people were having to rise at a certain hour for the first time in history, but before the invention of the alarm clock. The "knocker-upper" was a person who went round with a long wooden pole, knocking on the windows to get people out of bed for their factory shifts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up

Unless you're attractive. Then they might appreciate the offer.

My British in-laws always have a good laugh when we go by the "Frugal Fannies" store in the States.

Reading that in British English: coffee, meet keyboard.

My favo(u)rite ambiguous sentence: I'm mad about the flat. What do you think it means? ;-)

Even better is "can I bum a fag?", which wins odd looks on both sides of the pond.

> . UK, where pants is pants and not trousers. ;)

I made this mistake once when I spent a summer in Ireland in high school. (I should add here that the people at this summer program were noticeably more homophobic than I was used to back home[0]) I had borrowed a pair of "trousers" from a friend for a costume for some event.

When asking permission from the RA later that night to go to a different dorm after lights-out, I told him, 'I need to give <friend> his pants back'.

I will never forget the look of horror that he gave me.

[0] Not sure if it's a cultural thing or just the program I happened to be at, but either way, it's relevant.

Confusingly, in the north of england and in scotland, pants means trousers, just like in the US.

Not in any areas of the north I've lived / stayed in. the only people in England who call pants 'underpants' and trousers as 'pants' are those who watch excessive amounts of US TV shows.

I'm from Salford and use pants/trousers interchangeably, have done since I was young. Perhaps this is also due to watching films too, which are mostly from the US over here. I haven't watched that many US programmes in my life time. I don't watch much TV at all really!

As a side note, I saw undies in the original too!

Never heard that in Yorkshire. Possibly a more localised thing?

not in my experience of scotland, though i do know geordies and irish who say pants.

Psh, that's not even as big a logo botch as the Brits committed to themselves: the UK Office of Government Commerce unveiled -- to much tittering and whispering -- a new "OGC" logo back in 2008 which, when rotated ninety degrees clockwise, looked like a stick figure standing and, er, "'aving a wank" in the local slang.

OGC quickly reverted to its old logo, correcting the er, boner, but nevertheless in some circles (particularly Reddit), "OGC" remained for some months a sort of shorthand indicating sexual arousal.

What about the London 2012 Olympics logo? That can't be undone, and it can't be unseen once you see it (ie. the Fedex logo effect not in a good way).

The London 2012 logo was a pile pants :)

Fortunately, once the games kicked off people forgot about the logo and it was a very successful event by all accounts and there was a huge buzz in the air with everyone (I'm a Londoner). Still can't believe they paid that much money for that!

That one offended my design sensibilities before I knew enough to be offended in other ways. It looked like some sort of very-early-90s Nickelodeon thing. Then I saw a specially colored version and... yeah.

If you read vertically, turn some letters sideways, and apply liberal amounts of imagination, it looks like "Zion" which was enough to offend the Iranians.

If you turn it a little more then it says exactly what it is...: http://www.theroar.com.au/2007/06/14/london-2012-the-logo/

Haha, ok, not quite but defo describes it :)

I remember when the BBC News aired a goatse interpretation of the London Olympics logo without realising the references being made.

What is wrong with people thinking the logo looks like underwear? I am willing to bet people are more likely to remember the logo and company. I remember when everyone was making fun of the name "Wii", but I would be surprised if that name, which generated free publicity, did not help Nintendo.

If the logo reminded people of genocide, okay change it. But underwear? Seems like a good thing to me since they might remember it better.

From a UK perspective, the problem is that "pants" can be used to say something is rubbish, or similar. We might say "that new Yahoo Mail design is a load of pants". With the Wii example, there is not the same sort of common use in any country I know of. (Maybe there is, but I don't know)

So, OK, it is amusing and probably memorable, but as I Brit I would have tell them that they don't want a bunch of Brits saying their product is a load of pants.

So, anything else, and it might be slightly clever marketing, but in this specific, I'd put my sensible head on and say they should avoid it.

According to his survey, 26 Brits said it. Hardly worth thinking about really.

As they stated, they didn't want Twitter search results for their brand to be littered with underwear jokes.

Probably upper management without sense of humour.

I can verify this [1]. The management team does not have a sense of humor.

[1] I am cofounder and COO

I bet the people here definitely don't appreciate funny names for internal projects either!

Lerch!

We still use Awesom-o and Butters every day

Just to be sure that you are who you claim, can we quickly take a look at the colour of your pants?

Sorry ;).

It's definitely this, they barely laugh at my Jurassic Park / Jeff Goldblum jokes anymore.

Valid question - "any press is good press" and all that. I think it makes sense to change it if 25% of users think that way but 2.6%? "Oh, how cute. Those Brits..." would've been just as valid of a response.

It's odd that no one has mentioned this, but part of the reason no American thought they looked like "Y-fronts" is because American briefs don't have a Y-front. I have never seen underwear that looks like the first and third example on the rjmetrics site. If you do a comparative images search for "briefs" and "y-front" I think it'll be pretty obvious.

The term “y-fronts” never caught on the US because American underwear maker Jockey convinced the buying public to use the term “Jockeys” instead.

I'm pretty sure I have seen "y-fronts" in US shops and in the movies. The post specifically mentions that people call them jockey briefs in the US.

Jockey (and only Jockey, as far as I know) used to have a Y-front, which is one of the reasons they never sold well in Canada. I still completely ignore the brand even though they changed to a more typical fly a couple of decades ago.

I see how this would happen with users in London, and I even see france, and come to think of it I can see rjmetrics's underpants!

I still don't really see the pants, but have in the past been guilty of designing, and using for two months in production, a logo that a focus group decided was "swastika-esque."

So maybe don't listen to me.

The first logo is not a dodecahedron; the geometry is wrong. In reality it would be impossible to see all the three faces drawn at the edge of the logo from the same perspective.

Perhaps people subtly pick up on this geometric imprecision and more easily associate it with something else?

If it was a small dodecahedron, like about the size of a dice, you would see those three faces unless you closed an eye.

Trivia: 'die' is the singular form of the plural 'dice'.

Extra trivia, so is dice. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dice?q=dice

Yeah, that's a position the Oxford dictionary took but it's not common. Although I guess the singular 'die' is only really popular with dice nerds.

http://grammarist.com/usage/dice-die/

http://www.websource.it/search/%22a%20die%22/%22a%20dice%22

Ay, I ken alright t'speak proper like.

"“Dodecahedron” took second place [...] followed by a laundry list of other geometric shapes."

Heh, heh, heh, he said "laundry list".

Exactly. When he said "laundry list", I thought he meant a flurry of words that meant Y-fronts.

Wouldn't an association with pants be better than a mere geometric shape? If it stays in ones memory for longer, then why the hell not? It's all about being recognized by the customer!

That reminds of that commercial for the Universal Technical Institute. It's funny hearing that guy tell me all the great things about "UTI". I probably wouldn't remember the commercial if they had some other boring acronym.

Microsoft Office 2007 came with a new feature, instead of going to the new ribbon at the top you could now highlight a chunk of text and a floating mini-toolbar would appear in which you could access the most-used commands: bold, underline, etc.

I remember the program manager demonstrating this to the closed group and announcing proudly that Office now had a `floater`.

At which point all of the Brits and South Africans either sniggered or plain exploded with laughter.

It took a while for things to settle before it emerged that the Americans in the room didn't see what was so funny, and the Brits and South Africans interpretation of a `floater` was a turd floating in a swimming pool.

The name was changed by the next time we saw the feature, if I recall correctly they went for the far less ambiguous "mini toolbar".

Why does a language have a word for such a thing? Is it common? I haven't even thought about the possibility of the existence of such a thing till now.

I'm solidly American, but I know that definition of "floater" also. I don't know where I learned it. It just kind of seemed like common knowledge.

Anyone that grew up going to public swimming pools, with other kids, knows the term. Not necessarily from first-hand experience, but at least from legend.

the white logo in the header bar still looks like Y fronts![0]

0. in the UK.

The logo keeps on making me giggle. It looks like underwear to me. I don't know if I'd have seen it without reading this article, but now that it's in my head, it's hard to get out.

I didn't even know what Y fronts are and it looks like underwear. Even the new one that's not suppose to still looks like underwear.

If you happen to do the Rorschach test and only see pants, please don't blame the test conductor.

Maybe the article just put it in your head. You can't "unsee" it, so to speak.

Yeah, that. I assume their rebranding is incomplete.

I don't see any underwear, but the thing definitely looks better with thinner lines. It brings out the 3d shading more. Presumably that's why more people recognise the geometry after the change.

I had the same issue, couldn't see the underwear at all. And finally after seeing the people in pictures, I can see. Internalization requires a lot of effort.

People who thought the logo was underwear before they put it on the front page of HN: 2.6% of Britons who read their website.

People who thought the logo was underwear now: (How many people read a frontpage HN article?)

Small images are often confusing, see http://www.reddit.com/r/misleadingthumbnails/

It's spelled internationaliSation (joke!)

We like to spell it "Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn"

I think the proper spelling is "i18n" actually.

It's funny how things like this only look like another object once someone mentions it. For example, when my step kids were little, they used to constantly ask about the "underwear" signs posted all over the place. Couldn't figure out what they were talking about, until I had them point it out sitting at a red light.

The traffic lights have stop signs that are folded down, and get unfolded when there are problems with the signals. So the bottom half of a white octagon does look like a pair of briefs.

The reason most of those images of underwear didn't look like their logo is because most of those pants (as us Brits refer to them as) were not proper Y-fronts.

If you look at this image - bar the colour / pattern of the underwear, it's actually geometrically similar (which the briefs they exampled were not)

http://img.thesun.co.uk/aidemitlum/archive/00418/SNF14WOM01C...

Does it really matter what 2-3% of a random sampling of people think in a single country? Could this possibly be too sensitive to trying to please too many people?

3% of the UK population = ~3m potential customers or detractors, so yes.

Even so... only about 3% decided to answer with underwear. I imagine it may have crossed an even larger percentage of user's minds, but they didn't want to answer with that.

3% of the UK population does not translate into 3M potential customers for their particular product, which appears to be some sort of Big Data service. It might translate into 1 or 2 customers out of those UK businesses that might actually need their services.

I work on translation technology, and have seen some pretty bad examples of companies choosing names that have bad connotations elsewhere.

One of my favorites is Evite, which means "avoid!" in Spanish, not exactly a good name for a party invite service.

The all time winner for badly named tech products was the Commodore Pet Computer, which was launched with great fanfare in France (and elsewhere). The only problem is pet means "fart" in French.

You don't have to be from the UK to see that that logo looks like whitey tighteys. (I'm from the US, and while the title of the article definitely solidified how I saw the logo, it still looks like men's underwear to me.)

I would suggest adding/removing more sides to the dodecahedron rather than rotating it... ("hendecahedron"? "nonahedron"?)

I would invest in refining that logo even further. I couldn't tell it was a decahedron until you mentioned it. I actually see more underwear in it than I do geometry. The small slivers and color shades also hinder its recognizability and limit its scalability and consistency across multiple mediums.

I think you are missing the point. The problem is that it is just not a good logo. It doesn't mean anything, it doesn't say anything about your company. If you can't come up with a good logo just make your company name the logo. Random geometric figure is not a logo.

Similar thing has happened to Yandex.Browser in Russia: http://browser.yandex.com/

A couple of vocal geeks suggested its icon looks like underpants on a sphere and now everybody thinks about that when seeing the icon.

YC-backed Survata (another consumer survey service) released a logo testing tool last month: http://survata.com/logo-surveys

Startups considering new logo options should check it out!

Disclosure: I'm a Survata co-founder

Best enterprise marketing blog post of the year - funny, fact-filled, self-deprecating, clever.

Good tidbit in the conclusion: "Hackathons are an amazing resource for kick-starting new ideas and proving out concepts. However, they should never be used to circumvent due diligence on big business decisions."

A similar case was a logo mentioned in previous HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509473

Once you see it ...

I have to admit I'm from the UK and I saw exactly that. Why?!

I'm from Canada and saw the same... but I'm going to go with being primed by the title >_>

Could be basque the title suggested it?

Note: I miss typed "because", and the spelling suggestion was "basque". Given I like an amusing typo, and the given subject, I simply had to leave it as is....

Possibly, but I went into the article thinking it was going to be about a poorly designed logo from a freelancer or one of those amusing situations where their company name means something weird in another language.

I didn't for a second think 'looks like underpants' was literal haha

why would they settle on a skewed 3d view of the dodecahedron as a replacement. it doesn't look like a logo at all now

Even without the article, first thing i saw: Y-front. PS: I'm from Italy. Maybe it's a Europe thing.

Why does it say UK saw underpants was "26%" when the chart right above says "2.6%"?

I see 26, not 26%. 26 is 2.6% of 1000.

(Just woken up and I am a bit blurry, so, I might be tragically wrong)

Yes I believe you are correct.

Thank the gods for that. Getting that wrong would have been total pants....

Thank you so much. Best laugh I had so far this week. And brave of you to point it out.

I don't understand the brandmark's meaning. It may as well be a swoosh

I don't know if your reference was intentional or not, but check out our old logo:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=rjmetrics%20swoosh&...

It reminds me of this french car named "Pajero", Spain is a neighbor...

The site chooses to use the type of social media buttons that tracks users, puts them in a fixed position, and, on my browser, the buttons obscure part of the text. I don't stick around long enough on sites like this to read any articles.

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