Heh. Here’s one from the vaults. Back in 1999, I did a phone interview for Fortune Magazine on the then-new ’swoosh-in-a-logo’ phenomenon. As a relatively small company at the time, it was a pretty big deal for us. Well, appears the article, written by Greg Lindsay, is now featured on the CNN Money website. Bearing the same title as when originally published – “I Want a Unique Logo, Just Like Theirs” the article can be found here. When the article was published in the summer of 2000, The Logo Factory was introduced to the world thusly –
Steven (sic) Douglas, the creative director of The Logo Factory, a six-person firm that has done hundreds of swoosh logos, sees it as just a “total lemming thing” are spending their days slapping it on their clients’ logos.
Not sure if I’d describe what we were doing back in 1999 as ’slapping’ swooshes on clients logos, but yes, I believed (and still do) that adding a swoosh to a logo is a ‘total lemming thing’.
Not much to discuss about the piece (the original twenty minute phone interview was pared down to a couple of lines) other than it’s probably still accurate from a design point of view (we’ve written similar pieces about swoosh logos and the “I want a logo just like theirs” phenomenon over the years).
There’s a funny back-story though. The interview was conducted over a cell phone while I sat on the front porch of my house. After what is best described as a ‘liquid’ lunch with a client. We weren’t even aware when the article was published – it was brought to our attention by our Fed Ex driver, who excitedly told me – “hey, I read about you in Fortune“. When I got my hands on the magazine, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the featured comments. Oh, they were accurate and all, but the quotes, especially this one –
“The argument against it is that everybody is doing it. It’s hideously boring.”
made me sound a little on the, ahm, arrogant side. I remember reading the article out in the main TLF studio, and commenting; “Wow. This article makes me sound like a total pompous asshole. I don’t really sound like that, do I?”
Alas, the silence was deafening.
Anyhoo, not a terribly eye-opening read or anything, but now we can officially claim ‘as seen on CNN‘. And stuff like that always looks good on a resume, no?
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