I happen to work right next to Mas­sArt and often find myself wait­ing for the bus in front of the col­lege. A week or two ago, I noticed a sign sport­ing the new Mas­sArt logo:

I lit­er­ally, with watery eyes, gazed at the way the ‘A’ crops the ‘S’, and thought to myself: “It’s beautiful.” I then imme­di­ately chas­tised myself for having such an emo­tional reac­tion to a piece of typog­ra­phy and resumed con­tin­ued read­ing my Howard Zinn book.

Brand New has an excel­lent review of new brand­ing and logo in MassTer­ful Iden­tity. The arti­cle also fea­tures a lot of excel­lent pho­tographs of sig­nage and mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial. Also, it appears as though a com­plete over­haul of the Mas­sArt web­site is in the works (thank God). I can’t wait to see what they do with the new one.

Score one for KJ’s alma mater!

I was pleased to see a review today in Brand New about the new Animal Planet logo.

Just as the author of the cri­tique men­tions, I was watch­ing the Puppy Bowl last sunday and noticed the new logo. Every time I saw it, it gave me a little jolt. Not really in a good way either. I kept think­ing to myself “What is that?”

Per­haps it was really just the two Bloody Mary’s that caused me to find the look of the logo so jar­ring. I dunno. That M is really bad though. It just looks like a mess. No matter how many times I look at the logo, I have to actu­ally think to real­ize the word is ‘animal’ and not ‘ani al’ or ‘ani3al.’ I bet my old Typog­ra­phy pro­fes­sor would have a fit over this one.

I’ve been trying to refrain from com­ment­ing on the new Adobe Pho­to­shop logo because it seems that every­body else already has:

• Pho­to­shop gets a new logo (com­ments)
• See What’s Pos­si­ble
• Pho­to­shop 2.0: The Wrong Kind of 2.0

The first three things that came to my mind when I saw the new logo were:

1. Ew
2. Microsoft
3. This is a joke right?

Noth­ing very ground­break­ing there. I haven’t read of a single person liking it, and many have also pointed out how sim­i­lar it looks Microsoft designs. While I thought Microsoft in the back of my head, I didn’t actu­ally bother to go look at any Microsoft stuff to com­pare. That is…until Armin Vit linked to one for comparison.

Yikes. I decided to go back to the Pho­to­shop web­site for some fur­ther com­par­i­son. As it turns out, there’s some very lovely¹ Microsoft-​esque mar­ket­ing videos. The thing that really caught my eye was the whole sil­hou­et­ted people con­cept. It reminded me of something…oh wait! I know! People_Ready!

I just don’t get what Adobe is trying to achieve here (other than cheap­en­ing their brand)². It seems like just a couple of months ago that Adobe went through that whole CS3 re-​branding thing. While I don’t think that it was 100% suc­cess­ful, at least it did unify the suite in a unique way. Those little color bricks have grown on me, although I still have an awfully hard time telling which one is which. The only one I can remem­ber is that Dreamweaver is green, but then again…Dreamweaver has always been green. Anyway, enough said on my part. Read Armin Vit’s arti­cle for a more artic­u­late analysis.’

1. Insert sar­casm here.↩
2. One could at least hope for a dras­tic price cut to follow. ↩

A while ago, Smash­ing Mag­a­zine announced that it was going to have a con­test to design the website’s new logo. The entries are in, and Smash­ing Mag­a­zine has posted them.

• Logo Con­test - Sketches and Designs

Some of these are quite nice. It’s very inter­est­ing to see the vari­ety of ideas from dif­fer­ent people.

Don’t forget to check out the Fav­i­cons at the end of the entry. I still need one of these…I’ve been grossly negligent.

Shame­less.

• Logo­Maid Rips Off Dan Cederholm’s Sim­pleBits Logo, and Then Things Get Weird