> When Jobs was asked what it was like to work with Rand, he said, “I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.’”
Same story here with Richard Serra: "Serra was invited to outline a proposal, for a fee, but said no. According to Cross, Serra told Ross, “You know what I do—you know that it’s going to be structural steel, you know it’s going to be monumental. What do I need to show you?” He added, “Hire me and I’ll go to work.” (Serra, through a representative, confirmed that he declined to participate but denied that he used these words.) Ross, recalling the encounter, described Serra’s work as poorly suited for the site, because it was “very subtle” and “not iconic.""
Web design, every day. Customer has a shit site, they know it’s shit, they want to pay someone $$$ to do a new site, and they want to change 75% of the new design because they think they know better than the designer...
"You are no longer a web designer. You are now a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing, and instant messaging." That's a hilarious comic. It reinforces why I took two steps down a career in graphic design and then ran away.
I would love to read a treatment of why the client-designer relationship is often so dysfunctional. I know we all can trot out ideas, but I want an in-depth, serious, unsarcastic treatment, all the better if it points to a cure.
I noticed the guy who designs icons for me always leaves what appears to be a deliberate mistake, I then point it out and it gets fixed. I know what he is doing and I'm pretty sure he knows I know what he is doing.
I've been tempted to make a Removable Duck for Unity3D and sell it on the Unity asset store for hourly freelance developers to use.
It will quickly pay for itself: The developer can drag a duck into the scene and configure it to define how many hours it will take to remove, and what kind of removal interface and effect to use. Then when they show the demo to the client, and the client demands "Remove the duck!", then can say "Ok. That will take X hours." Then they simply type some secret hot keys or click on some invisible hot spots for a while, and the duck will pop up a count-down timer and slowly start shrinking or dissolving or whatever, until it finally disappears after X hours with a puff of smoke, and then the developer can bill the client for that many hours.
Which in turn is a version of the old tradition of movie directors to include a scene that was so over-the-top that when asked by studio executives/MPAA to cut the movie a bit, this scene can be sacrificed.
After working in a web agency for years I learned to be very wary if the client’s current website is terrible.
My first reaction was to think ‘what a terrible job the previous lot did, I’m sure we can do better than that’.
But it’s always the clients fault.
Either they slowly unpick all the design decisions so the new site is no better than the old one, or they balk at the cost, get it developed on the cheap overseas, then pay us more than the original quote to fix all the resulting problems.
Takeaways:
1. The IBM logo was iterated on. IBM clearly didn't love the first one and it was ugly.
2. The OS2 and NEXT logos are very similar. The clients wouldn't be happy if they saw them side by side like they're displayed on that page.
I remember seeing that OS/2 circle on books and boxes and it never even occurred to me that it was 'the' logo. It appeared as if a single (OS/2) circle was a unit applied indiscriminately.
It even says so in the trivia section on that very page: "During an interview on Google, Sam Esmail, the creator of the the series, stated that E Corp's logo is actually the Enron logo."
I chuckled at that, too, but I have to admit: you could show me that tilted E and I'd recognize it as an Enron logo this many years later. Even scarred by infamy, it's a very memorable symbol.
You don't have an untrained eye; you've looked at logos all day long for your entire life. Some of this guy's work was great, and some of it was crap. The same could be said of a collection of any person's work.
Sure, but this is presumably just a small sample of his work that he's most proud of and has self selected.
It's interesting / surprising / puzzling to me that someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating his craft and presumably knows far more about design than I do would choose to showcase something that appears to me to be a total eyesore, which makes me think I might be missing something.
I hate making these types of trashy low class reddit-esque quips, but did everyone see the guest appearance by Napoleon Dynamite towards the end of the clip?
Personally I hate the NeXT logo. I've always thought about just how awful I think it looks every time I see it. This is the first time I've got the sense that people genuinely love the logo. Very interesting!
The logo looks great on an actual NeXTstation, cube, or MegaPixel, since those are entirely black. The logo pops right out. It really does look good IMHO.
It’d be interesting to imaging the modern evolution of it equivalent to what has been done to the Apple logo over the years, appearing in the same places the Apple logo does today.
You know... I'm a "Rand" fan, but I never cared for the NeXT logo either. It's just so cheap-looking (at least to me) and jarring compared to his other work. But then again it never had a presence in my day-to-life either, unlike IBM.
I'm also in the 'not a fan of the Next logo' camp as well - to me it just seems too noisy, pretentious and out of whack. It reminds me of American cars of the period, which were gauche and terrible. It has an unsettling geometry, which almost seems unfinished. Plus the typeface is just .. wonky.
I guess all these things add up to 'cool logo by a millionaire for a billionaire' in some peoples minds, but to me it just seems like cat barf. Literally, as in .. something that was just spit up, with chunks of undigested stuff in it.
In the context of the 80s-early 90s color preferences, it's great -- and it still stands bold today. It's also more humanist than techie, and Jobs also wanted that.
Note too, that most logos in use today are tweaked versions of their former designs, even if the designer was such a design icon as Lowry (e.g. Shell and BP logos). For example Apple's rainbow logo.
But your looking at it from the perspective of 2018.
Back then it was a bold and striking logo for a computer company.
As another commenter said, perfect for the late 80's early 90's.
In fact if you look at the London 2012 Olympics logo that too was gaudy but it did its job and the wider marketing materials did a fantastic job of building on it an applying it across everything.
I never knew who Paul Rand was. This is great. Especially whoever linked the list of his work.
I wanted to draw the mild comparison to a Canadian with a similar cultural impact here: Allen Fleming.
Unfortunately Fleming died young otherwise his work might Have pervaded.
He designed the CN (Canadian National Railways) logo that’s still used, Ontario Hydro, was art director at Maclean’s magazine, Ontario Sciene Centre logo, and was responsible for many designs at Cooper & Beatty Type— including the type-o-file. He also literally wrote the book on designing Canadian stamps as I just found out.
I can't remember where I heard this story, and don't know if it's true, but the story was:
Steve Jobs commissioned some famous European designer to come up with a revolutionary design for his awesomely great NeXT computer. When they flew out to see the design, it turned out to be shaped like a human head, so a pissed off Steve Jobs and his team got back on their plane and flew back to the US.
Known for his fanatical approach towards hardware design, Stevie was poised to make the company’s first-ever computer a machine that embodied power and strength. Repulsed with the results of the several design houses he hired to create protoypes, including one that resembled a human head, he brought in the designer of the Snow White design language, Hartmut Esslinger, to create the final product. Jobs immediately labeled it the NeXTcube when shown the end result. Even though the machine stoodout as a complete failure, it was the NeXTcube's groundbreaking form factor that established the radical design identity of Apple’s future desktop machines.
Logos are pretty easy to make, rarely important, and spending excessive money on them is always a vanity (or incompetence) expense by founders / C suite. Companies/products make the logos, not the other way.
Well, sometimes. It’s no coincidence that the Nike swoosh fits perfectly along the side of a shoe. If you’re a design company and you can integrate your logo as a design element and it adds something instead of standing out as a gratuitous advertising badge, you have an advantage. See also: the three Adidas stripes.
64 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] thread> When Jobs was asked what it was like to work with Rand, he said, “I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.’”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/thomas-heather...
You get to a certain level, you can charge for your process, as it should be.
I would love to read a treatment of why the client-designer relationship is often so dysfunctional. I know we all can trot out ideas, but I want an in-depth, serious, unsarcastic treatment, all the better if it points to a cure.
http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck-technique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess#Development
It will quickly pay for itself: The developer can drag a duck into the scene and configure it to define how many hours it will take to remove, and what kind of removal interface and effect to use. Then when they show the demo to the client, and the client demands "Remove the duck!", then can say "Ok. That will take X hours." Then they simply type some secret hot keys or click on some invisible hot spots for a while, and the duck will pop up a count-down timer and slowly start shrinking or dissolving or whatever, until it finally disappears after X hours with a puff of smoke, and then the developer can bill the client for that many hours.
My first reaction was to think ‘what a terrible job the previous lot did, I’m sure we can do better than that’.
But it’s always the clients fault.
Either they slowly unpick all the design decisions so the new site is no better than the old one, or they balk at the cost, get it developed on the cheap overseas, then pay us more than the original quote to fix all the resulting problems.
Good clients already have good websites.
He also did the UPS, PBS, ABC, Enron, westinghouse, and surely many other big ones that slip my mind.
PBS and westinghouse are especially favorites of mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rand
http://www.paul-rand.com/foundation/identity/
That's like saying "you have had a body for your entire life, don't let any doctor tell you what's good for your health".
People can listen to music for their entire lives and still have crap taste.
It's interesting / surprising / puzzling to me that someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating his craft and presumably knows far more about design than I do would choose to showcase something that appears to me to be a total eyesore, which makes me think I might be missing something.
Paul Rand https://www.amazon.com/dp/0714839949/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_4GO2...
> The NeXT logo mightn’t be a classic [...]
Excuse me!?
http://www.nextfood.ca/
I guess now that NeXT has been defunct for decades, being inspired by its logo isn't a big deal.
[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
I guess all these things add up to 'cool logo by a millionaire for a billionaire' in some peoples minds, but to me it just seems like cat barf. Literally, as in .. something that was just spit up, with chunks of undigested stuff in it.
Note too, that most logos in use today are tweaked versions of their former designs, even if the designer was such a design icon as Lowry (e.g. Shell and BP logos). For example Apple's rainbow logo.
I think it looks as if designed by a techie.
I wanted to draw the mild comparison to a Canadian with a similar cultural impact here: Allen Fleming.
Unfortunately Fleming died young otherwise his work might Have pervaded.
He designed the CN (Canadian National Railways) logo that’s still used, Ontario Hydro, was art director at Maclean’s magazine, Ontario Sciene Centre logo, and was responsible for many designs at Cooper & Beatty Type— including the type-o-file. He also literally wrote the book on designing Canadian stamps as I just found out.
http://www.marthafleming.net/allan-fleming-project/
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/designkultur.wordpress.com/2010/...
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/allan-fleming-the...
https://gdc.design/fellows/allan-fleming-fgdc
Steve Jobs commissioned some famous European designer to come up with a revolutionary design for his awesomely great NeXT computer. When they flew out to see the design, it turned out to be shaped like a human head, so a pissed off Steve Jobs and his team got back on their plane and flew back to the US.
There's some mention of it here:
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/10/steve-jobs-most-i...
Known for his fanatical approach towards hardware design, Stevie was poised to make the company’s first-ever computer a machine that embodied power and strength. Repulsed with the results of the several design houses he hired to create protoypes, including one that resembled a human head, he brought in the designer of the Snow White design language, Hartmut Esslinger, to create the final product. Jobs immediately labeled it the NeXTcube when shown the end result. Even though the machine stoodout as a complete failure, it was the NeXTcube's groundbreaking form factor that established the radical design identity of Apple’s future desktop machines.
Logos are pretty easy to make, rarely important, and spending excessive money on them is always a vanity (or incompetence) expense by founders / C suite. Companies/products make the logos, not the other way.