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Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Logo updates are not always improvement

 

Banners outside the New York Historical showing off the rebranded name and logo

I know this is not new, it's just been a while since I have visited the museum formerly known as The New-York Historical Society that now has dropped the hyphen and the last word while adopting a color scheme it considers significant but that is all-too-common in the digital world. And that H just screams modern hospital and not historical to me. 


The above summarizes my point and is a more accurate TL;DR than you're likely to get from an AI overview. Now we'll get more in the context and details associated with why I consider the logo such a disaster. It's not just a question of personal taste but of what the organization and Lippincott (likely a very expensive design agency) claimed they were aiming for with this design and why it fails.

Considering colors and unnecessary hyphens

In their own words, this is what they were after with the colors and the design of the H:

Stemming from the hyphen in “New-York”, the centerpiece of the evolved identity is a bold “H” symbol that reflects the institution’s historical authority and its role in fostering dialogue between different ideas, eras, and individuals. The symbol is paired with a classical name style and historical colors. The orange in the palette is a nod to the state’s origins as a Dutch colony, while the blue references the union of the American flag.

As someone who knows that before New York was named for a place in England, it was called New Amsterdam and that orange was the color associated with the royal family and the House of Orange, I got the color reference even without the explanation. However, it's a bit of stretch to claim the blue as a reference to the American flag, which everyone always refers to as red, white, and blue -- not just blue.

Why drop the red? Obviously, it doesn't go well with orange, which is serving as the warm contrasting color in that color palette -- one you see a lot on websites that seek to convey the combination of blue calmness and dependability with the energy associated with the orange. The colors, however, are the least of their problems.

 The real problem here is the idea of both dropping the hyphen and then claiming to enshrine it in the H by making it stand out in a modern design. That's a contradiction if I ever heard one. There is no reason to memorialize the hyphen in that way. Just let it disappear just like the word "Society." Is there an S to remember that? No, and there shouldn't be. If you rebrand, there's no point in saying we're putting in this feature to remember there used to be a hyphen. That is utterly pointless. 

What the logo should do

Given that the rebrand was about shortening the name to be more inclusive, the logo should have encapsulated that with the new abbreviation of NYH for New York Historical. That would be intuitive and to-the-point. Instead, they opted to the H alone, which with its modern, clean look would be much better-suited to stand for a hospital than a place devoted to recording and exhibiting history. The triple letters would also better match the concept they claim the rebrand is about -- the triple identity of the state as a Native-American then Dutch and then British colony. All that is lost in attempting to convey the brand in a single letter. 

I'm sure many millions of dollars were shelled out for this design and that all the emperor's yes-men had to sing the praises of his new clothes. As the museum draws very small crowds, many of which do not come repeatedly the way I do, they are not likely to face the same kind of backlash retailers like Gap do when their customers really dislike a logo update


Related: 

Speaking of gifts

 

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Billboards are getting smarter

The Future of Smart Billboards

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Want to get a smoker's attention? Try a smart billboard that coughs. That's what a responsive billboard designed to promote smoking-cessation products from a Swedish pharmacy did.  As the
 video of the billboard in actions shows, it looks like a static picture of a man until a smoker gets close enough to trigger the digital screen to shift to showing the same man coughing. That's followed by a picture of the promoted products.Picture a billboard, and likely you think of a static picture with a slogan or some other words on it, or maybe a sort of revolving picture in a more dynamic version. That's old school billboards. Today's technology allows billboards to pick up on essential cues that enable them to tailor responses to the people in front of them. These are smart billboards equipped with responsive  abilities. And there are more developments ahead.


Read more in 

The Future of Smart Billboards

Friday, May 20, 2016

Optimizing the mobile experience

Mindful of the increasing number of its customers who access its site through smartphones, Simplyhealth enhanced its mobile application delivery.

As a major health-cash-plan provider that serves nearly 3.5 million customers in the United Kingdom, Simplyhealth has to keep track of the pulse of its customer base in order to meet their needs effectively. Knowing that about 40 percent of its Web traffic comes through mobile devices, the organization has to ensure that its content works on a range of different units.
In the past, Simplyhealth underwent a lot of time-consuming testing that didn't accurately replicate the user experience. Determined to forestall any possible glitches in its mobile service, the organization started looking for a solution in 2013.
- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/mobility/testing-responsive-design-on-mobile-devices.html#sthash.qjHcgp3u.dpuf

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

The right words matter just as much as the right colors

I noticed that people who post interior decor shots started following me on Google+. I would guess they are doing so in response to the post in which I said this:

Anyone here connected to a paint company like Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams? I have a whole new concept for packaging and marketing colors that can truly revolutionize the consumer experience. It's the solution to information overload in which all the colors meld into a blur, and one can't remember which is which any more.

 I really do have a groundbreaking idea and another really brilliant approach that can be coupled together or used separately. It would make colors accessible, memorable, and particularly shareable on social media in a whole new way.

But to return to the matter of the people following me, here's the thing: I'm a words person. As beautiful as some of the pictures are, I get thrown off by the formulaic and clueless way the descriptions are written. Every single one of them starts with an adjective that is not really appropriate. It sounds like the person writing doesn't really speak English and merely selected words at random from some list. We have descriptions like this:


  • Astonishing big black tolomeo floor lamp mixed with small green living room apartment wall paint color plus brown wooden seating area set

    .
  • Appealing small brown living room apartment set with decorative table lamps also square crystal chandelier

    .
  • Amazing small living room apartment set with red cushions plus round black acrylic table under flush mounted ceiling fan

    .
  • Awesome sleek herringbone parquet floor mixed with small brown white living room apartment set plus pink floral window curtains

    .
  • Miraculous attractive undulating pendant lamps mixed with small grey living room apartment plus red sectional sofa and white coffee table

    .
  • Captivating comfy corner blue bean bag sofa with rainbow wall decal plus small white living room apartment set

    .

  • Trust me, the images don't match, and really, nothing I've ever seen in interior design deserved the term "miraculous."

    Tuesday, May 27, 2014

    A soft sell for sensors

    Wearables go where no devices have gone before when designed to fit wherever one wants them on  the body.  Fitting the device to the body, rather than the body to the device: that’s what defines the technology developed by MC10.  This privately held company partners with well-known brands, like Reebok, to bring its technology into the consumer space.  I spoke with Elyse Winer, Manager of Marketing & Communications at MC10 about the company’s innovative products. Read about it in  A Soft Sell for Sensors