Burn, Logo, Burn
I’ve always thought that the new Wachovia logo channeled the Partridge Family, and now the rest of the covey is back on the bus.
The Sprint/Nextel merger produced a logo combining the worse of both brand identities; the screaming yellow needs the old blocky Nextel caps and the pin drop, instead of piercing a diamond, is now half a pair of phoenix wings trying to escape the new font.
Brown does nothing for me, but I like the new Quark logo, which, like Sprint, previously suffered from the black/white/red 1985 treatment; the newbie logo is sweet, like iLife’s ‘05 branding, which has spiraled out of control in iLife ‘06.
Apple has chosen larger metaphors lately with the double helix on the ‘06 packaging and assimilating the I-Ching into the iFamily with a yin-yang bastardization on the new Universal logo. In the original,
each half of the diagram contains the seed of the other; the two small circles represent the birth of the other, literally the new moons of the summer and winter solstices. And Apple does have a new satellite, or at least an affiliated planet with a ring, if we look at Intel’s new logo.
The old logo’s subscripted “e” intimates that Intel is inside; the new logo does not look as if it can leap ahead—careen maybe.
The Danny Bonaduce of the group is the new AT&T logo:
It hurts to be scooped by Madonna,
but as Bradley Dilger points out, there’s no need to emulate the Death Star. Or one of Vader’s white helmets.
If you can’t decide how to employ the pointed oval partridge shape, and if, perhaps, you’re waffling in your identity since the Velvet Divorce, there are always Tufte’s small multiples. The Czech Republic uses the Olympic color scheme and transforms the five little partridges into speech bubbles to represent diplomatic quintuplespeak.
As always, it could have been worse.
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Posted Tuesday, January 24th, 2006, 9:32 am | Filed in Design. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
January 24th, 2006 at 10:57 am
I’m ambivalent about the Quark logo. “Sweet” is a good choice of words. It would be at home on one of Madelyn’s toys.
Sprint’s pin drop (like the Aflac duck) is, if cheesy, memorable, and I understand trying to keep it in some way. But 90% of the folks who see the logo won’t see the pin drop in that horizontal monster.
January 31st, 2006 at 6:20 pm
And, an NSA variation on the AT&T logo to accompany the new lawsuit brought by the EFF.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:10 am
[...] is tall, navy, requires a yellow left bottom gradient to work, and indicates the designer’s decision to align SunTrust with Sun Belt. It is the visual equivalent of either Sultan of Sequins Bob Mackie (now designing brooches for QVC) meets Cherokee Casino or, tacky wood slat blinds in an artificially warm cherry finish: an upside-down bolo minus the turquoise center or a window treatment. Nice work, Suntrust; I’ll follow the partridge. [...]