Tech Logos in Chicago Font

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Graphic Design

June 17, 2013

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The designers of the original Apple Macintosh faced a challenge. They wanted a computer with beautiful and proportionate fonts, but with a small black-and-white screen, the graphics were still quite limited. Thankfully, Apple had a very talented graphic designer named Susan Kare. Kare designed all the icons for the original Mac, as well as many of the fonts. Most of the fonts that came with Mac were adaptations of established fonts like Times New Roman and Helvetica. However, the main font used on the computer screen was an original Kare design called Chicago. The Chicago font was designed for maximum readability on the Mac’s tiny little screen. As technologies improved, Apple came out with a TrueType version that was scalable to any size, but I prefer the original pixelated look of 12-point Chicago.

The logos below are all rendered in the original bitmap version of the Chicago font, blown up for artistic effect. And since Chicago, like all Apple fonts, includes a glyph for the Apple logo, I even included the Chicago version of the Apple logo, rendered with the modern gray shading of the 21st century Apple.

Apple Logo in Chicago Font

Cisco Logo in Chicago Font

eBay Logo in Chicago Font

Google Logo in Chicago Font

HP Logo in Chicago Font

IBM Logo in Chicago Font

LinkedIn Logo in Chicago Font

Microsoft Logo in Chicago Font

Yelp Logo in Chicago Font

YouTube Logo in Chicago Font

Technology companies tend to use simple wordmarks and basic geometric logos. As such, these designs all look pretty good in Chicago. They certainly look better than my renditions of famous logos in ugly fonts like Papyrus and Jokerman. The fact that Chicago holds up after all these years is a testament to the genius of Susan Kare.

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Tom’s Diner: An Influential Song

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Entertainment

June 13, 2013

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Tom's Diner MP3 File IconIt’s such a simple little song, a two-minute ditty about a woman sitting in a diner. Eight simple notes played in several variations, with a catchy a capella “doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo” repeated throughout. But Suzanne Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner” is more than meets the ear. In fact, it is one of the most interesting and influential songs of the modern era.

November 18, 1981

The lyrics of “Tom’s Diner” are a simple description of Suzanne Vega sitting in a coffee shop watching things go on around her. It’s an observational song, one that deals in details. In that regard, it’s very similar to the Ice Cube song “It Was a Good Day“, in which Ice Cube details all the things that happened on a single day, which a blogger named Donovan Strain dated to January 20, 1992. Because of the details in the song, “Tom’s Diner” is equally easy to date. In the song, she mentions a newspaper running “a story of an actor / who had died while he was drinking”. Vega admitted that the actor in question was William Holden, which dates the song to November 18, 1981.

Monk’s Café

“Tom’s Diner” is not only based on a real date; it’s based on a real place. In the Morningside Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, there’s a little café called Tom’s Restaurant. It’s been a popular place for decades, frequented by both Barack Obama and John McCain. It’s also the diner of choice for scientists studying global warming and climate change, since the Goddard Institute for Space Studies is just upstairs. But to most people, Tom’s Restaurant is the favorite haunt of Jerry Seinfeld and friends. The building’s façade was used on “Seinfeld” whenever Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine went to eat at Monk’s Café. How a single diner could feature so prominently in song and on screen is beyond me. But Suzanne Vega’s song has one more claim to fame, one that impacts our lives on a daily basis.

Mother of All MP3s

Today we take such things for granted, but if you want to listen to “Tom’s Diner”, you can do so with just a few clicks of your mouse (or taps of your finger). You don’t have to drive down to a record store and buy a physical CD. This is thanks to the invention of the MP3 file. Before the MP3, sound files were very large, too big to transmit over the Internet. That all changed thanks to a German engineer named Karlheinz Brandenburg. Brandenburg and his colleagues were working on ways to compress audio files to more manageable sizes, but the results were iffy. Then one day, Brandenburg heard “Tom’s Diner”. With its sparse and subtle vocals, the song was the perfect test piece for the MP3. Thanks to this song, Karlheinz Brandenburg and his colleagues were able to get the compression algorithms just right, and the modern age of digital music was born.

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Effective Naming Rights

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Marketing

June 10, 2013

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Wrigley Field Sign for RentI’ve always been fascinated by naming rights. It’s interesting what people will rename for money, and what they won’t. Stadiums, for example, are fair game.

Stadium Naming Rights

Naming things after wealthy benefactors is an age-old phenomenon, but modern corporate naming rights date back about a hundred years. It started with Fenway Park in Boston, named after a local real estate agency. Then there was Wrigley Field, so-named because William Wrigley owned both the Chicago Cubs and the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company. But it was in my birthplace of St. Louis that the idea really took off. Anheuser-Busch wanted to name the local ballpark “Budweiser Stadium”, but the Commissioner of Baseball wouldn’t allow them to name the stadium after an alcoholic beverage. Undeterred, Anheuser-Busch proposed naming it after the company’s founders, the Busch family. Once the name Busch Stadium was approved, they came out with a new beer called Busch Beer. In this case, the beer was named after the stadium, not the other way around.

Here in Dallas, our basketball/hockey arena is called American Airlines Center. A couple of years ago I was quite confused when the Dallas Mavericks faced off for the national title against the Miami Heat. The Heat play at American Airlines Arena. I felt a little two-timed when I learned that American Airlines was sponsoring both arenas. After all, they’re based out of Dallas/Fort Worth. What are they doing in Miami? Corporate sponsorship works best when there’s at least a little bit of hometown pride involved.

Sponsored Events

Naming rights don’t just apply to physical buildings. You can also sponsor events. You see this a lot with college bowl games. These early post-season football games had simple names like the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl and the Rose Bowl. Today these games are known as the Allstate Sugar Bowl, the Discover Orange Bowl and the Rose Bowl Game Presented by Vizio. Then you have the Capital One Bowl, the GoDaddy.com Bowl and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. But when it comes to ridiculously long names, you have to look at the world of auto racing. The Brickyard 400, one of the biggest races in NASCAR, is officially called “Crown Royal Presents the Your Hero’s Name Here 400 at the Brickyard Powered By BigMachineRecords.com”. This race has two different sponsors in its name, along with the name of a first responder honored by the race organizers. With a name that long and unwieldy, everyone just sticks to calling it the Brickyard 400. You have to wonder if the companies featured in the name are getting their money’s worth. People are lazy, and they will continue to call the event by its short name if the full name is too hard to say. And while I like the idea of naming the race after a heroic firefighter, the honor is dissipated by the crass commercialism.

Effective Naming Rights

I’ve said this before, but you don’t always control your brand.

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To Change a Light Bulb

Categories:

Travel

June 6, 2013

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Ikea Man with Light BulbMechanical abilities do not run strong in the Lovelace clan. Not in my branch of the family at least. Neither me nor my dad have ever been very good at making and fixing things. Case in point, the homemade picture frame that ripped half the plaster from a wall. Then there was the desk we built, an attractive design that was always a bit wobbly. But when it came to fixing things, I’ve always thought that we were competent enough to change a light bulb. Boy was I wrong.

It started with a trip to Oklahoma. My dad and I would drive up to WinStar Casino in Thackerville, spend the night drinking and gambling, and explore southern Oklahoma along the way back. But just as I left my place to pick him up, the right rear tail light went out in my car. With my tail light out, I was afraid I’d get pulled over, so we stopped at an Auto Zone on our way up north. There I bought a two-pack of incandescent light bulbs, and with my dad’s help, we started undoing the thumb screws in the trunk. Soon we were able to pull the tail light out of its housing, and fit the new bulb into the right slot.

The problem was fixed, and we drove all over southern Oklahoma without any problems. Then, right after I dropped my dad off at his house, the tail light went out again. Since the bulb came in a two-pack, I opened up the trunk to change the bulb as soon as I got home. The bulb that was in there didn’t look burned out, but I switched it around anyway. This worked for a day or two, then it went out again. I opened up the tail light housing, wiggled the bulb into its socket, and fixed it once more.

After a couple of weeks, I concluded that there was a problem with the socket. Neither of the two light bulbs I had would say in the slot. After all, the bulbs weren’t the screw-in kind; they just wedged in there. I tried holding them in with electrical tape, but to no avail. Figuring there was a short in the wiring, I took the car into the shop. They did an electrical diagnostic and found nothing wrong. There was no short in the wiring, no corrosion in the socket, and no problem with either of the two light bulbs. Mystified, they told me to drive the car around till the light went out again, then bring it in for another diagnostic.

I left the shop disappointed. I just wanted my tail light to work, but interestingly enough, it didn’t break again. All my car needed was a professional mechanic’s touch. A few days after I got my car back from the shop, my dad called me up and asked about the tail light. I told him it was working just fine. As it turned out, the problem was “user error”. Somehow, my father and I, with over 35 years of schooling between us, couldn’t change a light bulb.

So how many Lovelaces does it take to change a light bulb? More than two, evidently.

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Redesign 101: The Flag of Nebraska

Categories:

Graphic Design

June 3, 2013

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New Flag of Nebraska

Proposed Flag of Nebraska

What’s the worst flag in America? There are some pretty bad ones out there. City flags, in particular, tend to be badly designed. But let’s stick to state flags for now. When it comes to state flags, there are plenty of bad designs. Almost half of the states have plain blue flags with seals in the middle, including Michigan, Vermont and Minnesota. But even amongst these generic blue designs, there are some ugly duckings. Of all these plain and ugly flags, the worst design award goes to the flag of Nebraska.

2001 NAVA Rankings

Current Flag of Nebraska

Current Flag of Nebraska

I’m not the only one who thinks that the flag of Nebraska is the worst in the country. Back in 2001, the flag experts at the North American Vexillogical Association (NAVA) ranked the flags of every US state, district and insular area, along with every Canadian province and territory. Of the 72 designs ranked, the worst flag award went to Georgia, which at the time, had a horrible compromise flag in the state’s effort to eliminate the Confederate battle flag. Georgia soon changed its flag to an attractive design that resembled the first, lesser known, Confederate flag. Which left us with the runner up: the flag of Nebraska. The Nebraska flag is nothing special. Indeed, it’s its forgettableness that makes it so awful. Like the other state flags I’ve redesigned, it’s really just a blue sheet with a seal on it. But even the seal is awful. It has that “designed by committee” look, where people keep adding things, afraid to step on anyone else’s toes.

A New Flag of Nebraska

For my new flag of Nebraska, I started with the thing that Nebraska is most well-known for. Corn. Fair or not, that’s what makes this state famous. And yet, I didn’t want anything too corny. (Mind the pun.) I didn’t want it to be too obvious, so instead of a drawing of a corn cob, I used a simple yellow stripe to evoke the look of a golden field of maize. I used the same blue and yellow shown on the current flag of Nebraska. Then in the same shade of yellow, I added the silhouette of a goldenrod, a common prairie flower that is the State Flower of Nebraska.

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