But this wasn’t really about its famous Swoosh symbol, which Nike founder Phil Knight famously had a lukewarm reaction to the first time he saw it, argues Debbie Millman, chair of the School of Visual Arts’ Masters in Branding program and host of the podcast Design Matters. One of the brands credited with breaking down those strict prescriptive hierarchies and setting up a different sort of future for the logo in the digital age is Nike. The founder drew the ghost symbol himself, and reportedly chose its background color by simply scrolling through the app store and noticing there weren’t many companies using yellow. As a point of contrast, consider the logo of one of the most talked-about tech companies right now: Snapchat. “And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me … If you want options, go talk to other people.’ ” Rand got the job and was paid $100,000 to design a logo for personal-computer startup Next, which that client, Steve Jobs, accepted.įew designers could get away with that even then, but it’s a fair bet that none could today.
“I asked him if he would come up with a few options,” one 1980s client later recalled. declared in a 1973 speech that designers still love to reference.) Rand in particular was notorious for presenting a single solution, the way a doctor presents a diagnosis and treatment. (“Good design is good business,” IBM president Thomas J. IBMīut perhaps the manuals were also a side effect of a harder-to-quantify characteristic of that era: the design agency as quasi-shamanistic problem solver, offering expertise in a nascent field its clients were just beginning to grasp. Many of their logos, shaped partly by the constraints of mid-20th-century production, “thrive in digital media, in applications that they could have never predicted,” Haviv says. For all that’s changed since the days when his partners founded the business, he argues, certain fundamentals-simplicity in particular-have not. Sagi Haviv, a partner in the firm now known as Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, says designers there still make initial sketches in black and white, with pen or pencil on paper.
MSN lives in an entirely digital world,’ ” Gardner says. “But Microsoft was saying, ‘We’re not going to print it. MSN.com’s early 2000s logo, a butterfly with complicated color overlaps, raised eyebrows among designers at the time, who pointed out how hard it would be to print. A shift from print-oriented color processes (responding to external light) to screen-oriented color (lit from behind, and thus more intense) enabled tricks like transparency and gradients. A couple of decades ago, when computers allowed designers to easily add shadows and highlights and dimensionality to logos, they did-revising, for instance, Rand’s flat UPS logo with 3D sparkle.
That’s just the latest manifestation of how changing technology has influenced identity design.
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