Not to hog the blog feed, but I just saw a good bit of expert (and not-so-expert) criticism coming in regarding the new logo for Windows 8. I will abstain from commentary at the moment, but would love to hear what others think. There is a quick summary of expert critique via PC Magazine.
11 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 20, 2012 at 3:33 pm
Austin Toombs
I’m not here to make any sort of intellectual claim, just to brag. When Colin first showed this to me, I immediately complained that the center, horizontal white line should be thicker on the right and thinner on the left. Colin told me that an expert logo designer said the same thing. Proud.
February 21, 2012 at 5:28 am
craigharkness
Again not an observation based in the readings just some general ones.
The dodgy perspective thing was one of the first things that hit me as well. I’m curious to what they’re trying to communicate with inference of depth from the tilt.
For me personally if they were going to simplify the logo they could have done so and still kept elements of the current Windows 7 one.
February 21, 2012 at 3:44 pm
jeffreybardzell
Looks like the Finnish flag to me (colors inverted), which just adds salt to the wound that is the botched perspective. This is a total fail.
February 21, 2012 at 5:28 pm
colinmgray
I think one of the interesting trends here, and in the article, is the sense of design supportability. There are certainly elements of a “fail,” but one of the premier design agencies in the world is responsible for the development of this branding system, and they must have had a pretty darn good design argument to convince Microsoft. On the other hand, a bunch of design arguments can be well constructed, but still be false in a face validity sense.
My likes, for just a moment, since many negative issues have been addressed already. The homage to the metro interface is, in my opinion, one of the strongest design arguments. The felt need of Microsoft to rebrand their image to grab a quickly evaporating market share in mobile and touch devices. And the other element is the idea of building a minimalist logo in the tradition of many highly successful corporate logos in the past. It has all of the elements for success, but may still fall flat for one reason or another. Like so many branding systems, the success will only be truly known once it reaches critical mass through the lens of the user and consumer.
February 27, 2012 at 3:11 pm
jeremypwhite
Just to brag, the perspective thing bothered me too. Anyway, like the DC logo, this may be better appreciated in a specific context.
February 27, 2012 at 5:06 pm
oppenlander
THIS is a logo?
February 27, 2012 at 5:11 pm
oppenlander
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3155261133531&set=a.2749000977281.130992.1625308126&type=1&theater
February 27, 2012 at 5:20 pm
oppenlander
Second iteration:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3155297694445&set=a.2749000977281.130992.1625308126&type=1&theater
February 28, 2012 at 5:57 pm
colinmgray
I think logos, of almost all modern cultural artifacts, are easy to dismiss as “easy”…but I think that passing critique often misses the point. Just a quick look through logos in a design book or at brandsoftheworld will lead you to the conclusion that creating a lasting brand imprint is not as easy or intuitive as it might first appear.
The other issue–which might be more appropriate in this forum, is to note e importance of design power and prestige in this situation. Adopting a logo created by Pentagram or Paul Rand or another famous firm or designer has significantly more prestige and promise of staying power, just by virtue of who the creator was. This ends up playing out similarly to prominent people in the art world, where reputation means more than a specific product situated in time…although that reputation has to come from somewhere. Thoughts?
March 4, 2012 at 3:14 pm
altoombs
In the general case, I still don’t like this notion that a person with a good reputation can make something and we’re “not allowed” to hate on it, but if some new designer makes it then we are totally free to make fun of it. Maybe the fact that the person has the reputation should give us a “wait, maybe there’s something there” moment for just a second, but if we still can’t figure out what’s good about what he created, I say screw it and poke holes in it, reputation or not.
That said, now that I’ve seen the new windows logo actually in windows 8, I can say that I really do like it. It looks really good in the middle of that right-hand sidebar.
March 4, 2012 at 3:25 pm
colinmgray
Austin, I don’t think I personally was making an appeal to reputation immune from criticism (at least I hope I wasn’t). Any artifact, especially in the brand or advertising world, is certainly fair game for criticism. What I was trying to focus on was the tendency for larger design firms with a good reputation to hold greater “weight” or what I might term design power in their act of designing. This is not the act of a single designer working in isolation—what we are critiquing in this sense is an entire company’s process and the confluence of a large number of designers, researchers, and to be sure, a lot of internal critique. There will be misses—absolutely—but I suspect there is a much deeper design rationale in many cases than we may ever realize. As I mentioned, though, no matter how much research or rationale informs the design, a brand is “made” by the public’s perception of that brand. A designer or firm can only prognosticate on how the public might react to a given brand imprint in a certain cultural-historical context.
For me personally, part of the critique process is a desire to understand the intent, not just critique for critique’s sake. Drilling down into the designer’s intent and how that maps onto the public reception of the artifact is what makes all of us better designers, and in the process, better critics.