The logo keeps on making me giggle. It looks like underwear to me. I don't know if I'd have seen it without reading this article, but now that it's in my head, it's hard to get out.
I spilled some coffee on some light coloured trousers on the way to the London office. The stain was centered right in my lap and I couldn't really go around like that all day, so I stopped and bought some cheap trousers at Gap to sort me out.
Pro-tip: Telling your local UK colleagues that you were running late because you stained your pants and needed to get new pants, and then offering to show people the stained pants is going to lead to some awkward moments.
Ah, wonderfully divided by a common language!!!! :)
"Fanny" is a great cause of transatlantic fun too. And if you are a Brit in the US, never ever say, "Im diving out for a fag". You're gonna get some odd looks.
Fascinating fact: the phrase "knock up," as in awaken by knocking, comes from the industrial revolution, after people were having to rise at a certain hour for the first time in history, but before the invention of the alarm clock. The "knocker-upper" was a person who went round with a long wooden pole, knocking on the windows to get people out of bed for their factory shifts.
I made this mistake once when I spent a summer in Ireland in high school. (I should add here that the people at this summer program were noticeably more homophobic than I was used to back home[0]) I had borrowed a pair of "trousers" from a friend for a costume for some event.
When asking permission from the RA later that night to go to a different dorm after lights-out, I told him, 'I need to give <friend> his pants back'.
I will never forget the look of horror that he gave me.
[0] Not sure if it's a cultural thing or just the program I happened to be at, but either way, it's relevant.
Not in any areas of the north I've lived / stayed in. the only people in England who call pants 'underpants' and trousers as 'pants' are those who watch excessive amounts of US TV shows.
I'm from Salford and use pants/trousers interchangeably, have done since I was young. Perhaps this is also due to watching films too, which are mostly from the US over here. I haven't watched that many US programmes in my life time. I don't watch much TV at all really!
I don't see any underwear, but the thing definitely looks better with thinner lines. It brings out the 3d shading more. Presumably that's why more people recognise the geometry after the change.
I had the same issue, couldn't see the underwear at all. And finally after seeing the people in pictures, I can see. Internalization requires a lot of effort.
at $0.10 for targeted and $0.50 for targeted (age , gender, etc) responses this seems like a great way for getting feedback quick. Has anyone got any experience doing them ? Does anyone know how these people answer surveys, is there a web portal for people to sign up to do them ?
I've seen them smack dab in the middle of boston.com "The Big Picture". You basically can't look at more than a few of the photos without answering a google survey question. For me, looking at this page now asks me who my auto insurance provider is with: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/10/broken_lives_of_fuk...
It must be blocked by AdBlock, because I've never seen one.
I'm realizing now I'm missing a pretty large part of the web, by using AdBlock and Ghostery: most social share buttons, ads, Disqus comments… I should probably go on the unadulterated web one day a month, just to see what it looks like.
I can't say what is is about your comment or the article, but something about the combination gives off the vibe that this is an astroturfing effort to promote Google Comsumer Surveys.
I'm a co-founder of Survata (YC S12) which also runs consumer surveys. We're lower cost than Google Consumer Surveys and give professional survey design advice for free. Email us at contact at survata and we'll hook you up with a Hacker News discount. :)
Note: I miss typed "because", and the spelling suggestion was "basque". Given I like an amusing typo, and the given subject, I simply had to leave it as is....
Possibly, but I went into the article thinking it was going to be about a poorly designed logo from a freelancer or one of those amusing situations where their company name means something weird in another language.
I didn't for a second think 'looks like underpants' was literal haha
I still don't really see the pants, but have in the past been guilty of designing, and using for two months in production, a logo that a focus group decided was "swastika-esque."
What is wrong with people thinking the logo looks like underwear? I am willing to bet people are more likely to remember the logo and company. I remember when everyone was making fun of the name "Wii", but I would be surprised if that name, which generated free publicity, did not help Nintendo.
If the logo reminded people of genocide, okay change it. But underwear? Seems like a good thing to me since they might remember it better.
Valid question - "any press is good press" and all that. I think it makes sense to change it if 25% of users think that way but 2.6%? "Oh, how cute. Those Brits..." would've been just as valid of a response.
From a UK perspective, the problem is that "pants" can be used to say something is rubbish, or similar. We might say "that new Yahoo Mail design is a load of pants". With the Wii example, there is not the same sort of common use in any country I know of. (Maybe there is, but I don't know)
So, OK, it is amusing and probably memorable, but as I Brit I would have tell them that they don't want a bunch of Brits saying their product is a load of pants.
So, anything else, and it might be slightly clever marketing, but in this specific, I'd put my sensible head on and say they should avoid it.
The site chooses to use the type of social media buttons that tracks users, puts them in a fixed position, and, on my browser, the buttons obscure part of the text. I don't stick around long enough on sites like this to read any articles.
The first logo is not a dodecahedron; the geometry is wrong. In reality it would be impossible to see all the three faces drawn at the edge of the logo from the same perspective.
Perhaps people subtly pick up on this geometric imprecision and more easily associate it with something else?
Good tidbit in the conclusion:
"Hackathons are an amazing resource for kick-starting new ideas and proving out concepts. However, they should never be used to circumvent due diligence on big business decisions."
I would invest in refining that logo even further. I couldn't tell it was a decahedron until you mentioned it. I actually see more underwear in it than I do geometry. The small slivers and color shades also hinder its recognizability and limit its scalability and consistency across multiple mediums.
It's funny how things like this only look like another object once someone mentions it. For example, when my step kids were little, they used to constantly ask about the "underwear" signs posted all over the place. Couldn't figure out what they were talking about, until I had them point it out sitting at a red light.
The traffic lights have stop signs that are folded down, and get unfolded when there are problems with the signals. So the bottom half of a white octagon does look like a pair of briefs.
Wouldn't an association with pants be better than a mere geometric shape? If it stays in ones memory for longer, then why the hell not? It's all about being recognized by the customer!
That reminds of that commercial for the Universal Technical Institute. It's funny hearing that guy tell me all the great things about "UTI". I probably wouldn't remember the commercial if they had some other boring acronym.
Does it really matter what 2-3% of a random sampling of people think in a single country? Could this possibly be too sensitive to trying to please too many people?
Even so... only about 3% decided to answer with underwear. I imagine it may have crossed an even larger percentage of user's minds, but they didn't want to answer with that.
3% of the UK population does not translate into 3M potential customers for their particular product, which appears to be some sort of Big Data service. It might translate into 1 or 2 customers out of those UK businesses that might actually need their services.
114 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] thread0. in the UK.
(Just woken up and I am a bit blurry, so, I might be tragically wrong)
Maybe this is more about the power of suggestion
0. UK, where pants is pants and not trousers. ;)
Edit: Also, pants is a UK way of saying rubbish. So, "that web site is a load of pants", might be said. Might be a sense of humor at work here.
Pro-tip: Telling your local UK colleagues that you were running late because you stained your pants and needed to get new pants, and then offering to show people the stained pants is going to lead to some awkward moments.
"Fanny" is a great cause of transatlantic fun too. And if you are a Brit in the US, never ever say, "Im diving out for a fag". You're gonna get some odd looks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up
I made this mistake once when I spent a summer in Ireland in high school. (I should add here that the people at this summer program were noticeably more homophobic than I was used to back home[0]) I had borrowed a pair of "trousers" from a friend for a costume for some event.
When asking permission from the RA later that night to go to a different dorm after lights-out, I told him, 'I need to give <friend> his pants back'.
I will never forget the look of horror that he gave me.
[0] Not sure if it's a cultural thing or just the program I happened to be at, but either way, it's relevant.
As a side note, I saw undies in the original too!
at $0.10 for targeted and $0.50 for targeted (age , gender, etc) responses this seems like a great way for getting feedback quick. Has anyone got any experience doing them ? Does anyone know how these people answer surveys, is there a web portal for people to sign up to do them ?
I'm not sure, I don't think I've ever seen one.
It seems that they somehow have you already targeted to a 10% accuracy level based on your search history.
Their case studies are also worth checking http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/use_cases
I'm realizing now I'm missing a pretty large part of the web, by using AdBlock and Ghostery: most social share buttons, ads, Disqus comments… I should probably go on the unadulterated web one day a month, just to see what it looks like.
http://i.imgur.com/aYE5GC7.png
Why is that "take the tour" button so messed up?
What issue were you having with the "take the tour" button?
1366x768 screen resolution, same position on Chrome and Firefox.
Resizing the window and reverting to full screen again results in this:
https://i.imgur.com/zkK85tN.png
Which is below the original fold.
Note: I miss typed "because", and the spelling suggestion was "basque". Given I like an amusing typo, and the given subject, I simply had to leave it as is....
I didn't for a second think 'looks like underpants' was literal haha
So maybe don't listen to me.
If the logo reminded people of genocide, okay change it. But underwear? Seems like a good thing to me since they might remember it better.
[1] I am cofounder and COO
We still use Awesom-o and Butters every day
So, OK, it is amusing and probably memorable, but as I Brit I would have tell them that they don't want a bunch of Brits saying their product is a load of pants.
So, anything else, and it might be slightly clever marketing, but in this specific, I'd put my sensible head on and say they should avoid it.
Perhaps people subtly pick up on this geometric imprecision and more easily associate it with something else?
http://grammarist.com/usage/dice-die/
http://www.websource.it/search/%22a%20die%22/%22a%20dice%22
People who thought the logo was underwear now: (How many people read a frontpage HN article?)
Heh, heh, heh, he said "laundry list".
The traffic lights have stop signs that are folded down, and get unfolded when there are problems with the signals. So the bottom half of a white octagon does look like a pair of briefs.