Logo wars
Chris Messina, Flock’s chief designer, recently unveiled his new company t-shirt with a special “Flockstar” emblem. It’s based on the favorites button on the Flock browser. Looks nice. But it sure does remind me of Rubyred’s logo:
What do you think: friends or foes?
February 14th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
I’ve noticed that logos go through major fads. I haven’t picked up on the latest yet - maybe this is it. I did find an article
about 2005 logo trends.
I noticed this in the late 90’s when all the dotcom startups had annoying blue and orange (or blue and green)
running men. I’ve blotted most of the names out but you’d see dozens on web pages, T-shirts, and Palo Alto
building signs. A quick search through the Internet Archive gives examples from Kozmo.com, PocketThis.
Before that (mid-90’s) it was curvy arrows. Amazon’s logo was circa ‘95. Both my two previous companies GKA (pre-web) and Powersim
had looping arrows. In particular the GKA logo was an “arrow-around-a-globe” which was very popular at one point.
Of course, pure circles remind me most of the AT&T Death Star logo of the 1980’s. Mike Bean and I were at a small software company MicroWords in very early 90’s with an almost identical logo. Interestingly, Cingular has just launched a softer, gentler (and lowercase) version of the classic logo with the rebranding of Cingular to at&t. Possibly Ruby Red and Flock are unconciously following a similar design trend.
February 14th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Just to be complete, here’s new AT&T logo. You’ve probably seen this of course. http://design.weblogsinc.com/2005/11/22/at-t-rebranded-wait-no-reinvigorated/