Spaceship

Fascinating how the design of the new campus reflects the organizational structure at Apple.

Apple is a functional organization. Unlike almost every other large company it’s not organized in “divisions” which have responsibility for “a business” in the sense of profit or loss. At Apple most people or teams are assigned a function like “design”, “engineering”, “sales” etc. When a product is being built, they are assigned to that effort. When the product is complete, they go to another product.

Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport

Michael Bierut wrote a very thought-provoking piece on why there is often outrage by the general public about changes in graphic design. He makes a very compelling argument that it is grounded in the perception of the difficulty of making art and a desire to fit in. Bierut offers these three observations about people’s approach to design that I found particularly enlightening:

First, in logo design, people prefer complicated things to simple things.

[…]

Second, people prefer literal things to metaphoric things.

[…]

Third, and most crucially, people prefer the thing they’re used to rather than whatever new thing you’re foisting on them.

The first one especially resonates with me. When seeing a clean and simple design, there is usually a feeling that it was also easy and simple to make. However, the opposite is typically true. Complexity has a tendency to always keep creeping in, and it often requires much more work and much more effort to make something more simple and elegant. It is frustrating to keep seeing the belief that the amount of complexity in something is proportional to its value or the amount of work required to create it.

The essay also uses the example of the recent branding change of the University of California, which I wrote about here. Watching the abrasive criticism of the new logo, I saw that a lot of it was due to its simplicity or the (incorrect) belief about radical change. This quote from the piece sums it up pretty well:

A seemingly endless series of drive-by shootings punctuated by the occasional lynch mob, conducted by anonymous people with the depth of barroom philosophers and the attention span of fruit flies.

About the New UC Look and the Resulting Hysteria

Wow, huge knee-jerk mass hysteria about the new University of California brand. First all weekend long on my Facebook News Feed, and now even linked to on Daring Fireball.

There’s a few important things to know about this new identity that most people are not completely understanding:

  1. The new identity is just a monogram and a wordmark:

    UC Lock-Up
    All that it is intended to replace is something like this:
    Old UC Wordmark
    The monogram itself (what looks like a shield with a “loading” C) actually isn’t really replacing anything specific since the University of California system never had anything comparable. UC doesn’t have a very cohesive logo for itself, which is what this project is addressing. They just had a wordmark, and the wordmark is mostly being changed to a different font (Kievet, a beautiful font in my opinion):
    New UC Wordmark

  2. What this also means is that the seal IS NOT getting replaced. Monograms and seals are two different things, and used in different settings. (This means that pages like this and this are wrong.) The only thing associated with the seal that is getting changed is the adjacent ‘University of California’ wording, which is changing to be the consistent wordmark, in the same Kievet font. This is what the seal will look like now:

    Same Seal, New Wordmark
    Same seal, different adjacent font.

  3. This is a branding change for the University of California system as a whole, which means that individual campuses don’t change anything. Berkeley, for example, still has its own seal (which is slightly different from the UC seal; notice that Berkeley is written on the right side of the seal):

    Berkeley Seal
    and its own logo/wordmark:
    Berkeley Wordmark
    UCLA, as another example, still has its own seal (notice again the ‘UCLA’ on the bottom, different from the state seal):
    UCLA Seal
    and its own wordmark:
    UCLA Wordmark

See the new UC Brand Guidelines website for more details about this change.

I feel that this was a necessary move for the University of California system as a separate group from the individual campuses. While the individual campuses, like Berkeley and UCLA, have had strong identities on their own (which, to repeat, are NOT getting changed), the UC system as a whole never had its own cohesive identity. The seal often got used in situations where something like a monogram or a wordmark would be more appropriate (for example, a seal does not translate down to small sizes very well).

Yes, even with this explanation, the new monogram itself might still appear ugly to some people (I for one think that it is refreshing and bold). However, I think the majority of the mass hysteria is rooted in people assuming that this is a replacement for our seal and missing it for what it is, and that is what frustrates me so much about this entire issue. It appears that this whole mess got escalated by an article that uses a provocative, and what appears to be clearly wrong, “before and after” image. It is in fact an “always and after” image. It also seems that the UC itself does not seem to be communicating very well (and this is not the first symptom of that which I’ve encountered). I first saw this design at least a few weeks ago here (which features a correct and non-sensationalized before and after image), a third-party and not from the University of California itself. If the UC wanted to refresh its image through a new bold brand, it should have also taken the bold stand to present the brand itself and properly: describing exactly what the change means and why it was a necessary move. There should never have been a space left for someone to come in and wrongly depict it. Instead, most people appear to have been introduced to the new brand somewhere else incorrectly, and likely tarnishing their new image before it even got a start.

Please Note: I am not an expert on design. As noted in the sidebar, I am an astronomy student at UC Berkeley, and this is well outside my forte. I love watching design as a hobby, and I’m incredibly passionate about my university, so when this hysteria started last week I felt that I should help clear up some of the confusion. If you notice any errors here, please contact me and I will try to correct them.

Edit: The UC reversed its stand on the new branding. As a result, their branding guidelines webpages subsequently got taken off the internet. The images of the new branding I was using on this post were hosted on their webpages, and also stopped showing up. I tried to replace them as best I could with any remains I could find online, but they are not perfect (I especially couldn’t locate any substitute of the UC seal with the wordmark online). I know, next time something like this happens, I’ll save a local copy of the images…

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
pxldot (Apple’s Icon Ecosystem or: Carrying the Quality All The Way Through)

Apple’s Icon Ecosystem

A very thorough look at the relationship between iOS icons and Mac icons, with many examples. The entire (long) post is an interesting read.

I have always especially been bothered by the iWork icons for iOS. They seem very lazy and do not at all take advantage of the rounded rectangle canvas. I wish they would be much more like the very well done icons in David Lanham’s Flurry package.

They respect the more limited canvas given by the rounded rectangle, and take advantage of it to create something much more distinguishable.

Citizen Kubrick

A really fascinating look at Stanley Kubrick’s private life. A few of the most interesting parts:

It is not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is exactly the same typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of Eyes Wide Shut and 2001. “It’s Futura Extra Bold,” explains Tony. “It was Stanley’s favourite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers, too. Clean and elegant.”

“Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to discuss?” I ask.

“God, yes,” says Tony. “Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs.”

As if I needed more reasons to love Futura…

From the beginning, I had mentally noted how well constructed the boxes were, and now Tony tells me that this is because Kubrick designed them himself. He wasn’t happy with the boxes that were on the market - their restrictive dimensions and the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the tops off - so he set about designing a whole new type of box.

When you care about details, even the mechanics of how the boxes you use every day function matter immensely.

I decided to see how Astronomy and Space looked on the new iPad, and I immediately realized that I never updated the header for the retina display. It didn’t look terrible, but it kinda looked out of place among all the other really sharp body text and headings . So I decided to redraw the header as a vector image and export at a higher resolution for the retina display. Much better! I also cleaned up some of the kerning and letter shapes as well while I was at it. (By the way, the iPad’s retina display is jaw-droppingly stunning! It looks and feels like a dynamic and interactive glossy magazine. You really have to see it in person.)
Pop-upView Separately

I decided to see how Astronomy and Space looked on the new iPad, and I immediately realized that I never updated the header for the retina display. It didn’t look terrible, but it kinda looked out of place among all the other really sharp body text and headings . So I decided to redraw the header as a vector image and export at a higher resolution for the retina display. Much better! I also cleaned up some of the kerning and letter shapes as well while I was at it.

(By the way, the iPad’s retina display is jaw-droppingly stunning! It looks and feels like a dynamic and interactive glossy magazine. You really have to see it in person.)