Mar

Snippets: The Oscar weekend, Logorama, Blog Fail & new Ubuntu logo edition

Steve Douglas on March 5th, 2010

Oscar weekend is upon us and the awards show will undoubtedly suck up the oxygen on the Tee Vee and the Internet for most of next week. As this is supposedly a logo design blog, not much to write about really, except wondering how Logorama, a cool little animated film that should interest graphic designers, will fare. If you don’t know what Logorama is, take a gander at this piece on the Logorama Oscar nomination we posted a few weeks ago. As of this morning, the video link included is still active, so you can watch the animated logo movie there too. For what it’s worth, we also took a look at the Oscar Best Picture nomination logos because, well, we’re just like that. And as that’s about as much logo design related stuff we can crowbar into Oscar news, we’ll move on…

Blog Fail: Just over a year ago I wrote a blog article called Why you should crowdsource your logo. If you don’t have enough time to read the piece (it’s long, wouldn’t blame you) let’s just say the link will lead you to a 5,585 word diatribe that’s a rabidly anti-crowdsourcing article into which I crowbarred as much snark as humanly possible (and then some) into 16 reasons why crowdsourcing a logo may be a very. Bad. Idea. Alas, at several times since then, the article has been twattered around Twitter, which is cool, by people who think it’s a pro-spec article, which it most certainly isn’t. All of this proves one of two things. Either many people on Twitter don’t read the links they’re twattering, or I need to step up the snark factor when I write my next anti-spec-work screed. The former is possible, the latter not so much. I’m not sure if it’s possible to squeeze more snark into any article before it becomes a black hole of sarcasm and irony, sucking the common sense from every article on this website.

Blog Fail 2. Speaking about mucking up this bloggy thing, I wrote a bit yesterday that looked at the most knocked-off, copied and overdone approaches to logo design. Nothing terribly big deal, bit of a puff-piece really, that featured the Ubuntu and Joomla logos as prime examples of how popular logos can get knocked off left, right and center. You know, logo copying dooshbaggery and all that. Next thing you know, folks are getting all hopped up, claiming I’m hating on the Joomla and Ubuntu logos and that I’m holding them up as examples of crap design, even inducting them into some Bad Logo Hall of Fame. Trouble is, I like the bloody things. The Joomla logo is a clever combination of network imagery, little ‘networked’ people, all made up using the letter ‘J’ and the nifty little Ubuntu ‘Circle of Friends‘ logo is ground zero for all the copying I was carping about in the first place (for what it’s worth, I don’t have a Bad Logo Hall of Fame, real or imagined, either). Oh yeah, they also think I’m “arrogant“. And our work sucks. [Twitter]

Speaking about the Ubuntu logo (whoa, that’s a good segue), there’s a new one. As part of their new branding program, Canonical Ltd (the folks behind Ubuntu) announced the new mark yesterday. “After six years it was time to refresh the face of Ubuntu starting with the word mark. We wanted Ubuntu to reflect the precision and engineering that sits at the heart of the product. The new logo reflects this but not at the expense of the immediately recognizable circle of friends“. You didn’t ask my opinion, but if you did, this is what I’d say: “Best logo in the history of ever“. Seriously. Ever.