[HN Gopher] What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
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What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)
Author : themantra514
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-11-04 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.paulrand.design)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.paulrand.design)
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Good read, but the many OCR issues were very distracting at
| times.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > Set in all capitals, the word NEXT is sometimes confused with
| EXIT possibly because the EXT grouping is so dominant. A
| combination of capitals and lower case letters alleviates this
| problem.
|
| Huh. Never knew why the 'e' was lowercased until now. I thought
| it was just "style".
| fsckboy wrote:
| looks like they lowercased the e to do a better job of evoking
| bobby indiana's LO VE
|
| sculpture, with tilting for good measure
| wodenokoto wrote:
| When I read the jobs biography I had to put down the book and
| look up the next logo after how important that logo and design
| process seemed to have been.
|
| 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.
| thomastraum wrote:
| the logo is one of the best ever made.
| jansan wrote:
| I was a young teenager at the time Jobs founded NeXT. The logo
| burned into my memory, and it is actually the only thing I
| really remember about the NeXT computers (besides them being
| black and cool). I still think it is outstanding.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The sad thing is, the logo was a tiny part of the experience,
| which these days folks only see the successors of iOS (and
| derived) devices, and Mac OS X (or whatever they're calling it
| these days).
|
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| Have you ever used GNUstep?
| linguae wrote:
| I'm not the parent, but I've been following GNUstep's
| development on-and-off for 20 years (I was in high school
| then and thus am too young to experience NeXTstep in its
| heyday). I truly wish the Linux community had embraced
| GNUstep instead of the Qt vs GTK path we ended up on. Even if
| the Apple/NeXT merger never happened, we could've ended up
| being a refuge for abandoned NeXT users and have adopted
| NeXT's solid application ecosystem; imagine updated versions
| of Lighthouse Design's applications running on Linux. Of
| course, the Apple/NeXT merger happened and changed the course
| of history; Linux could've benefited from sharing a GUI API
| with Mac OS X.
|
| One of the most interesting developments that came out of the
| GNUstep world was Etoile, 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 Etoile 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| Yeah, Etoile didn't get enough traction and they moved on.
| It was looking very attractive for a while. David is now
| working on CHERI.
| em-bee wrote:
| that is the problem, unfortunately it will take a few
| dedicated people who do not worry about traction get a
| project like this to a useful state. i had long hoped for
| GNUstep to become a great desktop environment but at this
| point i am more likely to go with haiku, once they have a
| decent multiuser experience (which they are already
| working on)
| linguae wrote:
| Yeah, the other challenge with GNUstep's adoption is
| building a desktop and an app ecosystem for it. There are
| some GNUstep apps, but the ecosystem is not at the level
| of KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK. In addition, even if GNUstep
| becomes fully compatible with the latest version of
| Cocoa, there are many macOS APIs that are not part of
| Cocoa. Another complication is the Mac ecosystem's
| gradual move toward Swift.
|
| 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| Wait, the calculator was a Java app? What versions was that the
| case for? That's really funny.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Apple got aboard the Java hype train with early versions of
| Mac OS X, they added a bridge so that you could write Cocoa
| apps with it, so the calculator is presumably a case of them
| dogfooding it. It didn't catch on. The bridge stuff was
| dropped after a while, and then built in Java was dropped
| just before the Mac App Store was launched.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Yep. It felt pretty even back then, where you could choose
| either. Get it? Java and Cocoa...
| joezydeco wrote:
| I always go back to the Saul Bass presentation to AT&T over their
| 1970 logo redesign. He takes _30 minutes_ to explain the thought
| process and sell this design _hard_. By the end you 're convinced
| it's the natural thing to do. I'm sure every executive in the
| room felt the same way.
|
| 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)
| solardev wrote:
| Wow, attention spans were so much longer back then.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The AT&T corporation was _massive_ back then. These folks
| were looking at rebranding every piece of equipment in the
| country, it wasn 't going to be a cheap adventure. Bass did
| the right thing by making them comfortable with the cost.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I met a designer at Verizon once, asked what the hell the
| deal with their logo was. He acknowledged that it was rock-
| bottom, worst-of-the-worst grade... and said that their own
| internal studies indicated a multi-billion dollar project
| just to change all the signs.
|
| Like, just look at that one sign overlooking the east river
| in NYC. That logo's gonna be around forever.
| Clamchop wrote:
| Incidentally, I went to their website to remind myself
| what the logo looked like, only to see that it has
| changed!
| dmd wrote:
| And then there's Pepsi. https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-
| content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Right. What am I looking at? It seems clearly a case that it
| started with the final logo they wanted and finished with 27
| pages of pure justification BS.
| Lammy wrote:
| Seems wildly successful to me considering we're all still
| talking about it despite the fact that they don't even use
| the logo any more.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I might be in the minority, but the NeXT logo never looked good
| to me - there's something off with projection of the cube.
| neverartful wrote:
| Since Steve Jobs is no longer with us to say it, I'll fill in
| for him. You're holding your head wrong.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Maybe because it is an orthographic projection and not a
| perspective one.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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?
| blazers777 wrote:
| 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.
| slater wrote:
| Well, if a little boy said it, might as well agree with
| him!
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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.
| eps wrote:
| 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.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| The presentation at NeXT office was recorded and is available on
| youtube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUTxtvlyJDc
| JBiserkov wrote:
| "Steve's goal is to transform the learning process at the
| college and graduate school level with a powerful computer and
| a new kind of software."
| duxup wrote:
| Least hip looking guy dropping a pretty iconic and timeless
| logo on folks there.
| almiron10 wrote:
| As a graphic designer, it was the way Paul Rand pitched the
| design that was the major breakthrough for me. Through interviews
| you can see how he pitched himself and his process to Steve Jobs.
| Paul's confidence in his process, backed up with his experience,
| is what sold Jobs on using Paul Rand and gave me the blueprint in
| how to deal with clients.
|
| 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.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Put another way, the logo can be anything.
| mannyv wrote:
| Paul Rand believed that the logo was a representation of the
| company. Its job was to promise as to what the company was
| about, and it was up to the company to fulfill that promise.
|
| I wonder what his thoughts were re: political logos, like the
| Communist Hammer & Sickle and the Nazi Swastika.
| em-bee wrote:
| isn't that pretty much the same thing? sell a product or an
| ideology. the logo is a representation of a brand that allows
| people to identify with it
| meerita wrote:
| I loved--and still love--this logo. Maybe it's because we have a
| gazillion startups and companies now, so every single logo looks
| the same to me. These old logos have spirit and personality.
| davedx wrote:
| This is truly a stunning logo, it's timeless and sublime. Hard
| to beat work like this
| chefandy wrote:
| Well, logos are a mode of communication that tell people what
| your brand is. Your brand should represent what you are, and to
| whom. Startups need to have "branding" in place to solicit
| investment, and they don't really have any idea what their
| company will mean to anybody, let alone their core demographic;
| they don't even know who their core demographic will be. So,
| every logo ends up trying to say "We are a credible and stable
| software company run by adults, but with energy and optimism"
| and the audience is California venture capitalists.
| grahamj wrote:
| I find it interesting that the final logo choice is not like any
| of the sketches. You could imagine that someone came along and
| went "no, not like any of that" and came up with something
| different.
|
| 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".
| asveikau wrote:
| > 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/
| grahamj wrote:
| I don't know if it was used in computer iconography at that
| time but I would have expected a designer to see it that way
| regardless. It means the same thing as the old Mac watch and
| is why MS used it in Windows.
|
| PS I miss that watch! It was way better than the beachball.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And the "beach ball" was originally the optical drive
| spinning, seeking.
| vitaflo wrote:
| They're sketches, it's part of the brainstorming process. As
| stated in the final presentation, Rand was trying to get away
| from the capital "EXT" in the name from reading like "EXIT". He
| ended up using a lowercase E for that, but it's obvious from
| the sketches he started first by stylizing the X instead,
| basing it on the Bifur typeface (as referenced in the
| presentation booklet).
|
| 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.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| NeXT and Apple are stories of a founder bulldozing ahead with a
| vision, his coming and going coinciding with the respective
| companies' high and low tides. The discussions around a "thing"
| are framed in the context of the of the thing, the founder, and
| one or more people who happen to be involved (the storyteller,
| scribe). No thing is ever discussed in isolation without the
| founder, and it's always the scribe who tells that story. You
| will hardly ever come across a pivotal story about NeXT or Apple
| without the founder being mentioned as a key figure in that
| story, to the point that it's their decision as to how that story
| ends.
|
| 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.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| I found this article, written by an assistant to the guy who made
| the NeXT logo, enormously interesting: The Daily Heller: The
| Assistant, Jayme Odgers, Works for Paul Rand
|
| https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-the-a...
| 2075 wrote:
| a true icon for generations to come :) sadly the ip is hiding in
| some shelf, this stuff must be used!
| nxobject wrote:
| It's fun in the gallery to see how his process was a lot, lot, of
| curious exploration of visual ideas. At one point he was thinking
| of an IBM-like "wordmark angled in a ellipse" logo; at another
| point he was looking at a futuristic hyperitalicize wordmark with
| MASSIVE X. They would have felt like so many different things!
| em-bee wrote:
| the NeXT logo is up there with other significant logos at the
| time, especially the SUN and SGI logos. my personal favorite of
| those is the SUN logo though. at least in print. the NeXT logo
| wins as a tactile 3D logo on a computer case, followed by the SGI
| logo which also looks better in 3D than in 2D. but in 2D the SUN
| logo wins with its clever reuse of the letters U and N as [?][?]
| looking like the rotated letter S, creating a circular structure
| that just appeals to the geek in me
| scrlk wrote:
| The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by
| Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the
| campaign director of the _Vote Leave_ organisation in the 2016
| Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for
| _Vote Leave_ :
|
| > 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...
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Diabolical.
|
| 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.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I think there's probably a bit of survivorship bias here --
| we know if this anecdote because the ballot box concept is
| actually quite good. But of course there are other "rip offs"
| that are bad (blonic the hedgehog?). The idea to make a small
| change was clever imo, but doesn't guarantee a great design.
| I think the ballot box design was either "lucky" or
| "inspired", perhaps without the creator even realizing it.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| For other reasons, I had come cross Cummings substack a couple
| of weeks ago - highly instructive, no wonder he was ejected
| from UK gov circles ...
| _joel wrote:
| Yea, maybe shouldn't have gone to Barnard Castle to get his
| eyes tested though.
| threeio wrote:
| Literally got my Next Slab working over the weekend, seen
| presentation before and its put a good smile on my face today.
| stevedekorte wrote:
| Congrats! I have strong nostalgia for the ones I worked on and
| owned in the 90s. Using those machines felt more like living in
| the future than any tech I've experienced since, including the
| iPhone.
| themingus wrote:
| I find the sketches reminiscent of the LaTeX logo delightful.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| A video of Steve Jobs (and his staff) seeing what he paid
| $100,000 for.
|
| https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand
| vdvsvwvwvwvwv wrote:
| If NeXT were still around to day the logo would be changef to the
| word "Next" in black sans-serif, not stylized in any way.
| heavensteeth wrote:
| The logo presentation booklet's cover - with just the letters N E
| X T in white scattered across a black page - is simply beautiful
| to me. I can't put into words what about it appeals to me. I can
| only imagine the effort put into that cover was far greater than
| it may appear.
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