Cyan logo! Free!
Today’s word of the day is Geek, because I have had this story of geekism on my mind. Where I work, we are geeks, mostly. One of the geeky things we do is come up with “code names” for each project we work on. There’s actually a good reason for this: marketing will change the actual name of the product 10 times while you develop and test it, and then after you pass the point where the name can not possibly be changed, 10 more times. Then in the next version they’ll rename it more. To escape this cycle of pain, we use code names, which need never change. The product name is set at manufacturing time by some configuration file, but all the internal documentation and source code refers to the code name.
The second level of geekism here is that we name all our projects after colors. (everybody needs a theme, for instance Intel uses rivers and towns in the Pacific Northwest) Previous projects have been Gunmetal, Daffodil and Magenta. Current projects include Quicksilver and Cyan. Coming up soon will be Canary. Some purists out there are now thinking “WELL SOME OF THOSE ARE HARDLY COLORS.” …You need to learn to think outside the box.
The THIRD level of geekism is that we create silly logos for each codename that we use on internal documentation and sometimes tchotchkes. For the project I’m working on, Cyan, the details of which are unimportant, but I can assure you are incredibly boring, I created the perfect logo. I sent it out in an email. I got lots of responses. They all hated it! Not enough “Zing”, one email actually dared to say. People began to do Google image searches and send back alternatives nicked from the web “How about this one?” “OOooooo I like that one!” “Hey, this one has a funky font!” “Look at this funny album cover I found.” And so on, and so on.
We ended up using one of those other logos, leaving mine consigned to the dustbin of history (along with 22,700 other things, according to Google). But because of pride in my fine logo-geneering skills, stubbornness, or maybe plain stupidity, I decided: This will not stand. I’m not going to let my fine logo go to waste just because the people I work with (to a man: even the art designer guy) can’t appreciate it. So I’m working the other end of the lazy-web: Post the lazy-web response now, and when the lazy-web request comes in, the answer will be waiting here.
So here it is. Need a logo for your project/product/company/clothing line/floor wax/dessert topping? Is it called Cyan? USE THIS ONE! IT’S FREE! (note: logo makes more sense if your previous project/product/company/clothing line/floor wax/dessert topping was called Magenta)
Disappointed? Now you know how the people I work with feel. Every day.
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A friend from Harlequin came up with what must be my favorite codename theme ever, man made disasters. They had Chernobyl, and 3-Mile, and Coconut Grove (Boston history), and Titanic.
Lately I\’ve been using new world monkeys.
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HA! At Outpost.com, we did the same thing for a while. Boy, those production netops guys sure didn\’t like installing \”Hindenburg\”.
Then we switched over to using release names that were sort of ironic comments on the content of the release… Oh man, there were some really good ones, I wish I could remember. The only one I can think of right now improved the logging system and was called \”Flogging the Logging\”.
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I know you tried, but as a professional designer, let me underline one point: use helvetica (Arial) at your peril. It adds layers (decades!) of genericness to your design that it now has to struggle under. I avoid it like the plague. Maybe in 30 years or so–if left alone to recover–we could rediscover it.
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If you aren’t careful, I’ll switch it to Comic Sans. I know how you guys hate that.