Please don't shorten links on HN.

the timeless http://www.pronetworks.org/v21/images/uploads/blog_images/xe...

vs. the new http://www.electricsistahood.com/images/ever/new_xerox_logo....

While we're at it, let's toss in MySpace:

the meh http://www.subscribersrule.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/my...

vs. the WTF-worthy http://studiokandm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/myspace_lo...

While I agree that URL shortening stinks for all sorts of philosophical and practical reasons, it grinds at me that HN's crippled markdown doesn't let you specify text for links. It makes it hard to integrate multiple links into text, because I am forced to line-break after each to achieve a minimum of readability.

You can see that the HN formatter is sympathetic to this type of textual disaster and "shortened" your links, just by omitting the last 20 or so characters of each.

I worked at Xerox when they did their rebranding. At a big company meeting I saw it and said, "seriously?"

Not only is it bland and generic, but my eyes keep thinking that the sphere is "off" somehow. Something about how they drew the lines on the X tricks my eyes and makes it look not-quite-spherical. Like they got the CEO's 15-year-old nephew to Photoshop a sphere.

We had a Ruby user group meeting at MySpace HQ here in LA after the redesign but before the troubles. The reception desk, the signs, everywhere I was confronted by their new logo. And I literally couldn't believe it.

My mind was blown and refused to believe this was their actual identity. So every time I saw it, I said to myself, "Really?!" I just had to visit their website again just now to make sure. This should not be anyone's reaction to a logo.

I still don't understand how such a mistake happened. "You know, we've seen lots of logos but we really love the one where you literally rip off the 'my' from the MyNetworkTV logo and put a sideways brace next to it. It makes us feel like crazy madmen that can do anything we want." I mean, that's my best-case scenario.

I like it better than the old one.

> So every time I saw it, I said to myself, "Really?!" I just had to visit their website again just now to make sure.

So for you, the logo worked. It got your attention and brought you into the site.

Myspace's new logo is perfect.

Empty, vacuous, without clear meaning.

Could not possibly summarize the company or product better.

The new Xerox logo sphere has the same problem as AT&T's new sphere logo. The perspective is off-center, so the poles are not aligned! Just looking at the AT&T logo makes me dizzy..

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/43/Att_svg....

Sometimes it feels good to work for IBM.

It's interesting that IBM has an animated logo on their current website that iterates through its past logos before settling in to the current one:

http://www.ibm.com/us/en/sandbox/ver2/ http://www.ibm.com/i/v17/t/ibm-logo-anim.gif

That's probably because it's IBM's 100th anniversary this year so it's running through the old logos as a retrospective.

IBM: proof that having a logo older than the Great Pyramids of Giza doesn't actually harm a solid business plan.