New logo - Hackdot

Re:New logo by tvanantwerp on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @02:57PM (#18924421)

This feels so generic. I get the problem they're referencing with too many colors and not working in all contexts. But the human mind being what it is, I never had a problem connecting "rainbow-colored #" with "Slack". This...this is just some kind of blob. I couldn't tell this apart from a big pharma company, or some kind of conglomerate that makes everything from toasters to jet planes. I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria, even as far as a generic colorful squarish logo. It's gone from "# means Slack" to "I guess that's Slack...?"

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Re:New logo by tpowell on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @05:33PM (#18926171)

^THIS.

It does feel generic. I'm actually retroactively impressed that the old one looked so classy using so many colors (pour one out for https://metalab.co, who is doing just fine). I actually loved the different treatments—the Slack brand always felt like one of their strongest assets. It looks like the Joomla logo now – https://www.joomla.org/

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Re:New logo by tir on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:37PM (#18925578)

Agreed, the '#' had a long history of indicating a channel, like on IRC, and by extension text-based communication.

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Re:New logo by libertine on Thursday January 17, 2019 @05:29AM (#18929719)

This - the # wasn't a random choice for slack. And there's no shame in that.

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Re:New logo by eppsilon on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:43PM (#18925658)

And for those not familiar with IRC, the association of "#" with Twitter hashtags says "communication" too.

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Re:New logo by Infernal on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @06:00PM (#18926415)

And for those not familiar with early Twitter, the hashtag was not a feature of the platform, but a shorthand way to indicate a topic. This of course was recognized and formalized by Twitter soon after, but I find it fascinating that it was a feature essentially developed by the users and more simply recognized by the platform later.

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Re:New logo by handyman5 on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @06:52PM (#18926868)

99 Percent Invisible did a whole show on this a while back: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/

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Re:New logo by jolmg on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @06:31PM (#18926689)

> a shorthand way to indicate a topic

And I imagine it was also inspired by IRC channels.

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Re:New logo by sleepybrett on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @07:02PM (#18926953)

100% slack is essentially evolved irc.

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Re:New logo by jolmg on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @07:09PM (#18927013)

The part I quoted was about Twitter, not Slack. Slack's relation to IRC was already mentioned. Essentially, my comment was "Not just Slack, Twitter too was inspired by IRC."

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Re:New logo by seba_dos1 on Friday January 18, 2019 @05:46PM (#18943842)

I'd bet that quite a lot of early Twitter users were also IRC users.

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Re:New logo by bobsil1 on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @06:33PM (#18926709)

It was nice homage to what they were ripping off, I mean modernizing.

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Re:New logo by markmark on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:57PM (#18925840)

To add to the generic feel they've changed the font for "slack" to be very similar to the fonts used by every other tech company ever.

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Re:New logo by philsnow on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @05:01PM (#18925886)

going through a "rebrand" is not something most companies undertake lightly.

> I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria

IIRC that rebrand was done to distance the company from cancerous associations with the name "Philip Morris", whereas the only reason I can think of for Slack to do this now is to give them a quick short-term publicity boost to make them more relevant to "retail investors" -- that is, this corroborates rumors of a public offering later this year, and imho means that it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

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Re:New logo by DonHopkins on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:43PM (#18925660)

It looks like a # woven out of thread that changes color when it ducks underneath.

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[dead]

Re:New logo by seandougall on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @05:50PM (#18926311)

No, I believe the point was exactly the opposite: that the new logo feels too immediately familiar, because it's so reminiscent of countless other red-amber-green-blue tech logos from Windows 3.0 on.

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