[Wikipedia-l] Re: New logo and further process

[Gareth Owen]

David Friedland <david at nohat.net> writes:

> What makes these logos successful is they are all simple, memorable, and can
> work in a variety of environments

Frankly, bollocks.  By and large, these aren't succesful logos, they're the
logos of succesful things (I exclude the DNC, for obvious reasons).  
Thats a Very Big Difference.

What the hell is memorable about Encarta's three blue ellipses?  
Or Britannica's thistle which is 
i)   Too detailed and therefore hard to scale (c.f. O'Reilly Camel)
ii)  Symbolic of thorns and difficulty
iii) Already the symbol of something else, namely Scotland.

Grolier's "simple logo" is the word "Grolier".  Memorable, but only usuable in
exactly the same environments as the word "Wikipedia."   
(c.f. Microsoft, Sourceforge)

The X Window logo is simple and memorable, but the X Consortium aren't exactly
setting the business world on fire with their success, are they?

Atari are bankrupt; 
"Coca-Cola" is monolingual and written in an ugly script (as is Walt Disney);
These are both brands whose success is founded firmly on the product: New Coke
had the same script, but for some reasong people didn't buy it.

The UN logo is illegible if small 
 (and they're going the way of the X consortium) 
I don't even know what the USPS logo is supposed to be, and only recognise it
 as Lance Armstrong's shirt design; 
Planned Parenthood looks like Dogbert's Brown Ring Of Quality
The Mozilla logo is unused outside its development community.
MIT logo is ugly, Stanford's make them look like a forestry service.

The Playboy bunny is nice, though. As is the Nike swoosh (which you omitted). 
But neither of those firms prospered because they had a nice logo.  
They prospered because guys like expensive training shoes and pictures of
naked women. 

And not necesarily in that order.
-- 
Gareth Owen
"It's not a human or civic right to edit wikipedia."
                                 -- kq cuts to the core of the banning debate