The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Vote Leave organisation in the 2016 Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for Vote Leave:
> The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).
I think there’s probably a bit of survivorship bias here — we know if this anecdote because the ballot box concept is actually quite good. But of course there are other “rip offs” that are bad (blonic the hedgehog?). The idea to make a small change was clever imo, but doesn’t guarantee a great design. I think the ballot box design was either “lucky” or “inspired”, perhaps without the creator even realizing it.
Dominic Cummings is an absolute mastermind, to a scary degree. One of those people, like Steve Jobs, who I can't help be awed by. Almost as if I live on a lower plane of existence to them
I explored the law. Cutting a long story short I figured out a way in which one could (legally) hire someone to pop around to Gould’s house in the middle of the night and go through his bins the night before bin day. For roughly a year I read many documents from the Blair inner circle including notes from Blair. Many of them were market research about the euro. I saw Gould writing memos for Blair who would try out ideas (remember ‘the bridge between Europe and America’?) then Gould tested the results. I tried to counter these moves but, obviously, without being able to tell people that my ‘hunches’ about what Blair was up to were not hunches. For a few thousand quid a month I had a window into the Government’s secret plans.
I always go back to the Saul Bass presentation to AT&T over their 1970 logo redesign. He takes 30 minutes to explain the thought process and sell this design hard. By the end you're convinced it's the natural thing to do. I'm sure every executive in the room felt the same way.
Right. What am I looking at? It seems clearly a case that it started with the final logo they wanted and finished with 27 pages of pure justification BS.
Yes, but that's just how it works. A respected designer brings talent and years of experience, expertise, theoretical knowledge, and intuition to their task. But like most of us, they aren't very good at introspecting to explain the real reason they arrived at a particular design.
They are, nevertheless, required by business types to come up with some sort of justification, and that's what you just read. It doesn't matter whether it's truthful or accurate, so long as it's plausible from a business perspective.
The AT&T corporation was massive back then. These folks were looking at rebranding every piece of equipment in the country, it wasn't going to be a cheap adventure. Bass did the right thing by making them comfortable with the cost.
I met a designer at Verizon once, asked what the hell the deal with their logo was. He acknowledged that it was rock-bottom, worst-of-the-worst grade… and said that their own internal studies indicated a multi-billion dollar project just to change all the signs.
Like, just look at that one sign overlooking the east river in NYC. That logo’s gonna be around forever.
> Set in all capitals, the word NEXT is sometimes confused with EXIT possibly because the EXT grouping is so dominant. A combination of capitals and lower case letters alleviates this problem.
Huh. Never knew why the 'e' was lowercased until now. I thought it was just "style".
As a graphic designer, it was the way Paul Rand pitched the design that was the major breakthrough for me. Through interviews you can see how he pitched himself and his process to Steve Jobs. Paul's confidence in his process, backed up with his experience, is what sold Jobs on using Paul Rand and gave me the blueprint in how to deal with clients.
People don't realize that a logo is an empty vessel that is filled with the peoples experiences of the company and product, it has to be the correct vessel. People online see a logo for the first time and judge it without any knowledge of the company or product, which is fine but not really helpful. Interact with the company and product and then judge the logo after time has passed.
Paul Rand believed that the logo was a representation of the company. Its job was to promise as to what the company was about, and it was up to the company to fulfill that promise.
I wonder what his thoughts were re: political logos, like the Communist Hammer & Sickle and the Nazi Swastika.
It's not just you. I don't think it works either. It's memorable, so that's good, but I don't think its flexible and I can't see it working below a certain size.
The NeXT logo is, like everything, a product of it's time. It would have had to evolve, just like the Apple logo. It's just that the apple with a bit taken out had a recognisable shape, which Apple have kept. NeXT would have had to transition as much as Microsoft has, because the Paul Rand design is so locked to that specific period in time. It's both the colors and the shape, where the Apple logo is just the colors. Maybe they could lose the writing and the colors, but then it just look like a Transformer faction.
The NeXT logo is interesting as an anachronism, forever locked in the early 90s, with no evolution, due to Apple buying the company.
You’re not. To me the Next logo is primitive and void of creativity. The GameCube logo easily surpasses it in every category. Additional points go to the animation of the GameCube logo.
I feel like it’s only good by collective agreement rather than any underlying merit. I wonder how many people would like it if they were told it was an idea a junior PM had put together as a holding pattern for a never-released Google product. Would it get the same level of adoration?
back in the day, during a talk about Westinghouse, we were all admiring Rand's striking and iconic Westinghouse Logo, the theory and precision behind it.
A little boy pointed at it and said "That logo is dumb."
And it was at that instant that we all suddenly realized that it was a pretty bad logo. We moved on to the next topic quickly after that.
I feel like the difference between art and design is that you shouldn't need to know any of the back story for design, it should just look right, even if the lay person can't quite tell you why it looks right. Nobody needs the backstory on the Nike tick. You don't need to be told that the lines on the FedEx logo are beautifully balanced.
Yep and it's not just the cube projection. It was in not a very good contrast with the futuristic elegance of the machine. First time I saw a NeXT in person, the logo looked like a placeholder of some sort, glaringly out of place.
There's symbolism in it that necessitates the angles that were used. It's a Great Work Black Cube (obvious), containing the life coil / ouroboros (the way the word wraps around on the second line), that runs The Next Step (represented by the 2D axial tilt — ever read Crowley? [0]), plus two-down-one-up / two-become-one (iykyk)
It's fugly and orientation is messed up; the weird angle is OCD-triggering.
They should just have taken the square with the "NEXT" letters, rotated it so that it's straight. Would be a lot better.
I remember it looked terrible and unmemorable. Really, if you asked me 5 minutes ago to draw it I’d be unable to. I only remembered it was some sort of ugly use of the NeXT characters.
Apparently people’s response to it is polarizing. I always thought it was a ridiculously bad logo.
the fact that you can even remember its shape and ugly colors is remarkable, considering this is a product that was never widely used and hasn't been sold since 1997
The colors are ugly, there are too many of them, and the font is too thin so the letters don’t contrast enough with the background. It makes the whole thing look dingy and poorly lit. I think it’s instructive that nothing Apple did after Steve returned looks anything like this logo.
I like orthographic projections, but this isn't one. The square at the top has perfect 90* corners, despite the "depth" (and thus being viewed from the side). Orthographic projections of a square squish it into a rhombus.
I loved—and still love—this logo. Maybe it's because we have a gazillion startups and companies now, so every single logo looks the same to me. These old logos have spirit and personality.
Well, logos are a mode of communication that tell people what your brand is. Your brand should represent what you are, and to whom. Startups need to have "branding" in place to solicit investment, and they don't really have any idea what their company will mean to anybody, let alone their core demographic; they don't even know who their core demographic will be. So, every logo ends up trying to say "We are a credible and stable software company run by adults, but with energy and optimism" and the audience is California venture capitalists.
Thanks for the video. Not to take away from it , but the accompanying article includes,
"There is nothing about the IBM symbol, for example, that suggests computers, except what the viewer reads into it. Stripes are now associated with computers because the initials of a great computer company happen to be striped."
Don't the 'stripes' in the IBM logo reflect a video display technology, such as CRT, with an electron gun refreshing in horizontal lines? I assumed the low resolution of the logo's stripes reflected the resolution - and therefore the text appearance - that people were used to seeing on computer screens at the time.
> Jobs had a sneak preview of the logo and loves it. As he awaits the verdict from his stuff, he can hardly contain his excitement. Assertive as he is, he values consensus.
That was just ... weird.
Knowing how temperamental and petty Jobs was and seeing how excited he was about the logo and Rand, all others present simply had no choice but to praise it.
No way of knowing what they really thought about it.
I found this article, written by an assistant to the guy who made the NeXT logo, enormously interesting: The Daily Heller: The Assistant, Jayme Odgers, Works for Paul Rand
The logo presentation booklet's cover - with just the letters N E X T in white scattered across a black page - is simply beautiful to me. I can't put into words what about it appeals to me. I can only imagine the effort put into that cover was far greater than it may appear.
Today I am using Wmlive as my daily driver. A Debian based distro with WindowMaker (NeXTstep clone) as default window manager. Looks beautiful.
https://wmlive.sourceforge.net/
The sad thing is, the logo was a tiny part of the experience, which these days folks only see the successors of iOS (and derived) devices, and Mac OS X (or whatever they're calling it these days).
At least we've moved on from the early releases where the Carbon Finder.app was a significant impact on memory, and the Java calculator app took multiple bounces to load Java and run.
I just wish that Apple would do something more meaningful than Sidecar so as to provide a stylus experience for Mac OS.
Apple got aboard the Java hype train with early versions of Mac OS X, they added a bridge so that you could write Cocoa apps with it, so the calculator is presumably a case of them dogfooding it. It didn't catch on. The bridge stuff was dropped after a while, and then built in Java was dropped just before the Mac App Store was launched.
I’m not the parent, but I’ve been following GNUstep’s development on-and-off for 20 years (I was in high school then and thus am too young to experience NeXTstep in its heyday). I truly wish the Linux community had embraced GNUstep instead of the Qt vs GTK path we ended up on. Even if the Apple/NeXT merger never happened, we could’ve ended up being a refuge for abandoned NeXT users and have adopted NeXT’s solid application ecosystem; imagine updated versions of Lighthouse Design’s applications running on Linux. Of course, the Apple/NeXT merger happened and changed the course of history; Linux could’ve benefited from sharing a GUI API with Mac OS X.
One of the most interesting developments that came out of the GNUstep world was Étoilé, which was developed in the late 2000s and looked like a promising rethinking of what a desktop powered by GNUstep technology could do. One impressive feature was its Smalltalk implementation, which brought NeXT technology “home” to its Smalltalk inspiration (NeXTstep can be thought of as a polished Smalltalk machine, with Objective-C and Unix in place of the Smalltalk language and runtime). Sadly Étoilé doesn’t appear to have been worked on in about a decade.
I know in recent years there’s been a major effort to get GNUstep’s API on par with the latest version of Apple’s Cocoa, increasing compatibility. Maybe GNUstep will finally become more popular one day, but I’m glad the project hasn’t died after all these years.
that is the problem, unfortunately it will take a few dedicated people who do not worry about traction get a project like this to a useful state. i had long hoped for GNUstep to become a great desktop environment but at this point i am more likely to go with haiku, once they have a decent multiuser experience (which they are already working on)
Yeah, the other challenge with GNUstep’s adoption is building a desktop and an app ecosystem for it. There are some GNUstep apps, but the ecosystem is not at the level of KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK. In addition, even if GNUstep becomes fully compatible with the latest version of Cocoa, there are many macOS APIs that are not part of Cocoa. Another complication is the Mac ecosystem’s gradual move toward Swift.
Haiku may not have a dynamic API like Cocoa/GNUstep, but it already has a well-designed desktop and it is capable of running BeOS binaries on x86 (but not x86-64), IIRC. From a desktop perspective, Haiku looks very promising; it’s finally almost ready for prime time.
Back in the day I booted the live CD, and I bought a magazine ages ago because the cover disk promised a similar environment.
I actually talked a co-worker at a previous job into using it (he was doing Mac OS X development at work, didn't have a Mac at home, and was able to use GNUstep for this after a fashion).
I do have a Linux box which I can use for it as well, and experimenting with it there is something I want to do now that my MacBook stopped supporting my Wacom One. My next tech purchase will be a Raspberry Pi 5, and I hope to experiment with GNUstep on it.
I feel like the only one who hated the NeXT logo, the colors, and further the whole design aesthetic of the OS and the concept of the Dock.
I guess it's better than its contemporary Windows 3 but Windows 95's start menu and taskbar seem far superior to me and I still prefer them to today's macOS Dock and top menu.
the NeXT logo is up there with other significant logos at the time, especially the SUN and SGI logos. my personal favorite of those is the SUN logo though. at least in print. the NeXT logo wins as a tactile 3D logo on a computer case, followed by the SGI logo which also looks better in 3D than in 2D. but in 2D the SUN logo wins with its clever reuse of the letters U and N as ∪∩ looking like the rotated letter S, creating a circular structure that just appeals to the geek in me
In terms of those retro "3D" logos I always favored the ones from Sun, Silicon Graphics and Nintendo 64. The NEXT logo looked amateurish by comparison.
It's fun in the gallery to see how his process was a lot, lot, of curious exploration of visual ideas. At one point he was thinking of an IBM-like "wordmark angled in a ellipse" logo; at another point he was looking at a futuristic hyperitalicize wordmark with MASSIVE X. They would have felt like so many different things!
Congrats! I have strong nostalgia for the ones I worked on and owned in the 90s. Using those machines felt more like living in the future than any tech I've experienced since, including the iPhone.
Glad I bought a NeXT Cube. Still looks like a futuristic otherworldly monolith. That Ross Perot had something to do with its inception still blows my mind.
I find it interesting that the final logo choice is not like any of the sketches. You could imagine that someone came along and went "no, not like any of that" and came up with something different.
It's also humorous to me that the designer was considering something that looks like an hour glass for the X. Imagine using a symbol for your powerful new computer that essentially means "wait".
> hour glass for the X. Imagine using a symbol for your powerful new computer that essentially means "wait".
Are you sure you're not mixing timelines? Was the hourglass established for this metaphor in 1986?
I first remember the hourglass cursor from Windows 95. At the time Macintosh used a wristwatch. This struck me as similar to Microsoft using "recycle bin" because they borrowed a metaphor and didn't want to say "trash".
It wouldn't surprise me to see earlier uses of the metaphor, but some quick googling is not immediately revealing them to me.
I don't know if it was used in computer iconography at that time but I would have expected a designer to see it that way regardless. It means the same thing as the old Mac watch and is why MS used it in Windows.
PS I miss that watch! It was way better than the beachball.
> It's also humorous to me that the designer was considering something that looks like an hour glass for the X. Imagine using a symbol for your powerful new computer that essentially means "wait".
I assume that association is why Rand abandoned the concept, but the opposing arrows also represent a crossing-over / pulling-apart / creating-reality / 2D-becomes-3D / new-dimension kind of thing.
The eventual Mac OS X uses the same symbolism. I remember being irrationally annoyed back in the day at the way Stebe Jovs would pronounce it “Mac OS Ecks” instead of “Mac OS Ten”, and it took me like twenty years to realize that it is actually Mac OS Ecks — it's Mac OS Up + Down. Peep the negative space and you can see the arrowheads, plus the axial tilt and crossing-over encoded in the way one opposing arm and leg of the Garamond X are thicker: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joewhk/1805068540
They're sketches, it's part of the brainstorming process. As stated in the final presentation, Rand was trying to get away from the capital "EXT" in the name from reading like "EXIT". He ended up using a lowercase E for that, but it's obvious from the sketches he started first by stylizing the X instead, basing it on the Bifur typeface (as referenced in the presentation booklet).
Since the logo with the "hourglass" styling was never presented to NeXT, it was obvious that it wasn't considered a strong candidate to show as part of the design process for any number of reasons.
It's important to remember that brainstorming and sketching are just that. You're just trying to get all the ideas out there, you critique them afterwards. We usually do not see those sketches, so I wouldn't take them literally.
When I read the jobs biography I had to put down the book and look up the next logo after how important that logo and design process seemed to have been.
I was quite disappointed and find it hard to say anything kind about it.
It works a lot better on Steve’s t-shirt where you can’t see the box.
I was a young teenager at the time Jobs founded NeXT. The logo burned into my memory, and it is actually the only thing I really remember about the NeXT computers (besides them being black and cool). I still think it is outstanding.
NeXT and Apple are stories of a founder bulldozing ahead with a vision, his coming and going coinciding with the respective companies’ high and low tides. The discussions around a “thing” are framed in the context of the of the thing, the founder, and one or more people who happen to be involved (the storyteller, scribe). No thing is ever discussed in isolation without the founder, and it’s always the scribe who tells that story. You will hardly ever come across a pivotal story about NeXT or Apple without the founder being mentioned as a key figure in that story, to the point that it’s their decision as to how that story ends.
The point? The thing is meaningless. It’s the story of the founder’s reaction and the cause and effect of the founder’s choices. The thing has no gravity in and of itself. It’s meaning entirely created and destroyed by the founder.
In the case of NeXT, it is literally the company rising and falling with the presence of the founder. The weight of any thing immediately diminished with founder’s departure. Nothing remained.
We shall see what happens with Apple. It may attain a new founder, or it may not.
This seems to reflect the trendy philosophy of the strongman, the business equivalent of the authoritarian dictator in government (and it merges into an oligarch - a strongman businessperson with political power).
Another possibly word for it seems to be the philosophy of megalomania: Their problem-solving and deep philosophical thinking yields the most basic, self-serving, egocentric outcome: More power, money, and credit for me. That's a pretty big dealbreaker for any rational examination, especially with any understanding of human nature and history.
What I don't understand is how followers of this philosophy overlook the obvious, basic, overwhelming flaw. How do you overlook that?
In a way it seems like the philosophy eats its own tail: Part of the modus operendi is the infinite con - endless agression, unlimited by any constraint, with the expectation that your opponents will be overwhelmed or exhausted, or at least perpetually surrender the initiative. SBF is a leading example, but we can name many more. Is the philosophy itself another infinite con?
> The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/117842715/where-did-t...