Gawker: valleywag, logos

Surf The Internet the Mostly Lower Case Way

Hamilton Nolan — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:40:06 EST

Stop everything, The Internet: AOL is now Aol. Whether superimposed on a fish or a hand or just some swirly crap, this logo makes the bold statement: We can no longer afford capital letters. [Ad Age]

When all else fails, change the logo

Jackson West — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Yahoo's stock may be tanking, employees abandoning ship, Carl Icahn divesting his shareholdings, and the company relying on once-hated rival Google to better profit from the site's traffic, but someone on the Sunnyvale campus has been working hard on a new logo! It's got the same jauntily jagged baseline, but dispatches with serifs for rounded linecaps. And, like much of the company's internal branding, it's finally purple. The story goes that co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang painted the walls of the company's original office a cheery purple and yellow because it was the cheapest paint at the store. The paintjob also served to distract early employees from the fact that the roof in the office leaked. In other words, CEO Yang has a long history of slapping a cheap coat of paint over severe structural issues in the hopes of boosting morale.

Why Google wants to be small

Owen Thomas — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:20:00 EDT

The sudden appearance, in millions of browsers, of a new icon for Google was jarring to many users, though the change was slight — a capital "G" replaced by a lowercase "g". An E.E. Cummings-esque affectation? Perhaps, since the change was driven by overworked, underoccupied Google VP Marissa Mayer. She says she made her designers go through more 300 variations before settling on a lowercase blue "g". After putting her employees through the wringer, she's now outsourcing the mess to Google users But if you read Mayer's rules for an icon, though, you'll see she's set to reject anything but the one she chose.

It can be any primary color except red or yellow. It must use a letter from the Google logo, but one that's closely associated with Google's services, which rules out "o," "l," and "e." Anything you want, as long as it's a blue "g"! Mayer's tyrannical design process aside, her business justifications for settling on "g" are intriguing.<./p>

The design constraints were all set around cell phones, not Web browsers. Mayer wants Google's new mini-logo to be distinctive on a wide range of cell-phone screens; blue will always show up reasonably well. The lowercase "g" has relatively thick features, which means it will hold up in low resolution. Google wants to be small — so it can have a big future in wireless.

Apple Logo Makes You Creative. Really

Hamilton Nolan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:23:08 EDT

A counterpoint for all you Apple-haters out there: a new study by researchers at Duke University found that "even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively." How did they measure that? By having the subjects list "all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall." That's science for you! If only gazing at the Apple logo could help me think of a good joke for this post. The actual scientific findings:

The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.
People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

"This is the first clear evidence that subliminal brand exposures can cause people to act in very specific ways," said Gráinne Fitzsimons. "We've performed tests where we've offered people $100 to tell us what logo was being flashed on screen, and none of them could do it. But even this imperceptible exposure is enough to spark changes in behavior."

[Science Daily via Neatorama]