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HP's New Logo Is the Awesome One It Never Used (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, HP announced the Spectre 13, the world's thinnest laptop. One of the subtle changes HP is making with its recent global brand offensive is to its logo. HP has decided to go with a minimalist design consisting of four slashes making up the "HP" brand name. Previously, "Hewlett-Packard" was written out in full on last year's Spectre x360. HP says it will be using the minimalist logo solely on its premium laptops. Even though the logo has received a makeover, it's not exactly new. This very same mark first surfaced online in a 2011 brand redesign study released by Moving Brands, who HP had hired to develop a new logo and brand identity.
HP laptops? nasty
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Must not be too much since it's on the front page twice.
Does anyone else think the logo looks showing the middle finger?
I don't get it. Is this sponsored content?
Hate to say it but I think I agree with all the crazy anti-Windows people that pollute this site. No use getting an expensive windows computer that can't play games. Windows is only if you're making a game machine or want to buy one of the $200 laptops.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
A story about an old rejected logo getting reused is really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
No! The logo police came down on it like a ton of bricks. The aspect ratio of the log does not match the company spec during the animation. They made us pull the release candidate and rebuild the whole software.
We had the last laugh though, we spun off the OEM software under our own brand, and HP competed with us, then spun off its software division as Agilent, and then we beat Agilent in that business. They eventually sold their customer base who used the competing version created by them to us and exited the business. Anyone who spent that much time enforcing logo display deserved to go out of business.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A multibillion dollar behemoth's new logo is 'awesome'. Truly Stuff That Matters.
Computers are still big calculators to me, despite if it is made on Japan or China or whatever is your favoritte place in the world. So, I just trip and the retards use the concept to search for trends, huh? I want to be paid for that. I mean, I want to be paid for calling You assholes by retards, because as far I know, I can just avoid anyone who doesn't seems to be a righteous person to me. Yes, I'm talking with You, "police" officers, before You spend millions of dollars paying your slaves to remind me everyday that a fucked up girl died in a terrorist act.
OK, Apple has a bite out, but it's still an apple. This, this is LSD talking.
It seems like HP got a new social media PR department to go with this new logo. I saw this story several times on Facebook, Engadget, and Reddit as well.
But, seriously, it's just a weird logo on a laptop that's too thin to be practical. Big deal. I don't want to carry around damn dongle to use an Ethernet or HDMI port!
A logo change for a company nobody cares about anymore is like don't care squared.
I hope they paid well.
If I look at it upside down it looks sort of like it is flipping me off...
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Should be interesting if goes to trial
upbeat marketing droneSo, Fiorina dropped out of the race without a snowballs chance in hell, I got great parking this morning, and we just invented a laptop thinner than the christgods at apple....
PHB: hey we need to logo the new brochures for third quarter what should we-
upbeat marketing drone: the one that kicks more ass than Popeye on bath salts.
PHB Ok steve we'll use...the lines...but honestly i swear to god no more coffee for you.
Good people go to bed earlier.
... But, seriously, it's just a weird logo ...
A logo should convey something about the company that promotes it. It should be an identifiable mark that clearly points you toward a specific company.
Some of them are historical, some are symbolic, some evoke emotion, some represent their product.
This one is remarkable in the sense that it does none of the things a logo does. It is similar to a HP logo for those who don't want to be identified as working on a HP product. Three carefully placed horizontal lines (perhaps not even fully connecting) would go MILES in letting me know these are letters.
I have done calligraphy for years, and the wrong curve in the wrong place will make a person misidentify a letter, even if the rest of the letter is in place correctly. Any font that completely destroys horizontal queues is not odd, it is stupid.
HP might as well have made their logo ". _ ."
Title:
Advertising HP Businesses News Hardware Technology HP's New Logo Is the Awesome One It Never Used
So I went to Wikipedia...
Hewlett-Packard, Founded January 1, 1939; 77 years ago
I'm not going to start screaming "OOOOH SLASHVERTISEMENT" because the story really has made the rounds everywhere, it's just a little disingenuous to suggest that the logo from a design contest in 2011 is the logo they "Never Used". Definitely some kind of PR spin.
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
I can see it, but only because I knew what was coming.
If I hadn't known, I'd probably still be wondering.
Epic fail IMO.
It looks like the logo for MIT Press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Press
That's all: this logo is ugly as shit. It doesn't even look like HP. It looks like a part of a postal bar code got stepped on. This minimalism thing is getting really out of hand.
That's a great logo, sort of like the Paul Rand IBM logo brought up to date.
Of course, great logo != great company. But it beats having a boring or shitty logo.
It costs: the time it takes for a user to post, and the time it takes to get voted up in the firehose. Don't like it? Be more active in the firehose.
Looks like it...
cues, not queues.
bored overpaid execs who just don't earn their keep anymore - THEY are the ones always who want to change a perfectly good company logo.
sgi had a great logo. the idiots changed it. hp had a very long-running and classic logo. they changed it several times.
I was at DEC and for some odd reason, they kept their nice, working logo for, well, the entire company history! apple has kept theirs mostly the same, too, over their history.
seems some companies hire marketing people who just don't offer anything of real value, they try to justify their jobs and do 'something' but usually they just create crap.
I understand that when a restaurant has a food poisoning and goes out of business (just a name change, really) to refresh itself, I get why that is done. but with hp? ok, the more I think about it, the more I guess I just answered my own question.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
... Three carefully placed horizontal lines (perhaps not even fully connecting) would go MILES in letting me know these are letters. ...
I rather like it (still not a fan of the current company, though). But, given their target audience, it might not be the best choice. I learned long ago that technical people are generally the wrong folks to expect to grok an abstract design.
#DeleteChrome
But, seriously, it's just a weird logo on a laptop that's too thin to be practical. Big deal. I don't want to carry around damn dongle to use an Ethernet or HDMI port!
Well, it certainly is a good thing that you aren't the target demographic, huh?
I've seen several stories obviously pushed by one social media organization or another not quite make it to the front page. I think out new overlords are just a little less savvy about preventing manipulation.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
yeah, i'm confused when fiji water started to make computers. i'll tweet them on my facebox ubers.
It's not going to make me buy it but I don't hate it. I'm not normally a fan of the minimalist craze and I'm not a product/brand zealot so I don't really care what logo is on what, as long as it's not gaudy looking or chintzy looking. This isn't a bad logo or anything. I've seen much, much worse. It doesn't scream "copied from another company and a fad" to me. It's almost elegant, it reminds me a bit of ballerinas.
Yeah, that last joint was probably one too many. Still, it's not an abomination. I'm guessing (I've only made it this far) there's at least one person outraged about it. If not here than one of the many other sites is bound to have some fan screaming angrily at clouds. It usually happens when people experience change, someone's bound to hate it. Then again, there are probably a few people for whom this is the best thing ever and are now hell bent on getting one - just for the logo. As it's only on their higher end products, they'll be able to tie their identity to yet another brand. Yay?
I suppose they'll be forced to like it, even if it's junk, as affirmation is a strong desire in some folks. Meh, it generated some buzz. That means the HP PR folks did their job well and the design team appears to have not done too poorly. We've seen how many logos come and go over the years? Someone above mentioned Apple but they've changed a lot too. Windows? That's changed a number of times. Opera, my browser of choice, changed recently. That actually didn't bug me but they also changed the text "Opera" (on the button) to "Menu." That actually was off for me. It's not easy to explain but I didn't hate it and I know it's a trivial thing but it's like I had to relearn where the button was. I've since figured out that I can (I think) change it back by setting a flag. I'd do that but then I'd be confused again. ;-) I'm acclimated to it now. It was visually distracting and such a trivial thing but I noticed it immediately and it bugged me for a few days before I adjusted.
I want to say that even Slashdot's changed their logo a couple of times. I seem to recall that the logo was a bit different at one point and that the faveicon.ico was different. I'm guessing that, if they did, there were some unhappy folks. Seems to happen with most any change but I don't recollect any outrage. I think maybe the beta was enough to make me repress a few memories. *nods*
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And if you flip it upside-down it is DQ for Dairy Queen. ... really dumb.
I can't quite put my finger on why but I hate looking at that new logo. Zero style. Zero sexiness. It looks like whoever chose this design was a overpaid suit with zero artistic talent.
Us tech people had no issue with the abstract "path forms a cube" logo of SGI. Nor did we have any issue with Packard Bell's abstract face logo. Gateway's cow logo didn't fool us one bit. Heck, we don't really think Apple's logo is a literally rainbow colored Mackintosh. The highly stylized Golden Gate Bridge of Cisco doesn't confuse us.
If you like it, fine. To each their own, but if one were to remove the horizontal lines, then HP's logo would be "-=" which would be just as unreadable as this four line alternative.
The difference between the abstract logos I've presented as good and HP's new logo has to do with identification. The items I'm holding up as examples are distinctive enough that one recognizes them as symbolic. A few horizontal lines is not sufficiently symbolic to differentiate between the tally mark for 4. In fact, this is barely differentiated from Cisco's logo, despite the sharper corners.
And don't dis technical people. If you spent half the time with designers that I have spent, you would understand that good designers are very technical. I'd wager that every detail of those four lines have been contemplated to maximize the pleasing effect upon the eye. It's just not a pleasing effect that gives away enough hints that we are talking about a company, let alone HP.
If vertical bars make great logos, then after we have half-a-dozen companies arrange their vertical bars with different corners, baselines and heights, no two companies would ever be confused for each other! (obvious sarcasm at work)
Does anyone care to guess the million dollar sum HP spent on their HPE logo?
Reminder: The HPE logo is a green rectangle.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The new logo is very nice, clean and minimalistic, but just look at the LIP watches logo from last century - somehow VERY similar.
I wonder if they are trying to hide the fact that the owner use a HP brand laptop?
I am not trying to joke here as my older computer was Lenovo and current one is HP. Both chosen with the criteria of being Debian compatible (chips) and I will not be running Apple in Starbucks for example.
If they are ashamed of being themselves and try to hide it, they have a bigger problem.
Is that the new Iiji laptop? Oh, it's just an HP, never mind.
Soon you will no longer be able to see anything without a VR headset that superimpose some actual information on the minimalistic designs.
"No, less contrast, you can still read it!"
"No, remove the borders, you can still tell its a button!"
"No, remove the underline, you can still tell its a shortcut!"
"No, remove the color under the icon text, you can still use a wallpaper!"
"No, tere is less then 75% of the screen empty, hide more functions!"
and now, the final frontier:
"No, simplify the logo more! There is still a way for a person who does not know what its is supposed to be to understand it!"
Nobody will know what it is unless you tell them, and even then some people will not be able to see it. .. but maybe the laptop will be so dreadful nobody will ever NEED to see the logo.
The more people install it, the sooner sanity will return to Redmond.
Also, have a firewall which stop the Information Leak if you use it privately.
I guess they already plan to Split The Atom Further. Keysight will be split into Peephull and Analitech, according to the latest rumors.
If you ever worked for HP, you would think that Hillary Leftham Clinton would be their chief ideologist. At HP it is all about empowering these minorities of sexual perverts, women who confuse the home with the workplace and the like.
They bought this "progressive" nonsense so hard that they forgot who made their company great: White men who devoted their lives to improving some extremely advanced technology just a bit more. As in "pcb-scale atomic clock".
Now they have spit on this Evil White man and the Evilers have moved on to Google, Intel and other competitors who run circles around this assortment of disoriented amateurs called "HP".
A logo should convey something about the company that promotes it.
That is what the designer thinks.
In reality we think more about the logo depending on what we feel about the company than the other way around.
If you want me to think good of a logotype:
1) Don't change it, it has to be recognizable as the one you always used.
2) Do good stuff. If I recall that good things comes with that logotype I will think it is a good logotype.
even if it lacks really thin horizontal line so that you can actually read "hp"
the old one really lacks personality.
Fun fact: if you rotate the traditional "HP" logo 180 degrees, it becomes "DY".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"liji"???
Yup. How awesome.
That is not a very original logo. The MIT Press has one just like it (same "font") and they have had it for decades. See http://mitpress.mit.edu/
"Don't sweat the technique."
Yeah. This is an article about a LOGO on a fucking laptop. Unreal.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
And it was such a garbage machine that i'll probably never buy anything ever again that has an HP logo.
Pretty smart of them to change it.
Wouldve been smarter to stop making shit computers, but who am i to judge?
I just took a look at the firehose, and every single one of the posts there is spam. Perhaps some automated filtering is needed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
HP = crap. Avoid. And by the way, just stop this slashvertising. It is getting boring.
Everybody sing along ...
At the bottom of the
Agreed. The entire trend of the last 30 years to logos that are brain-dead boring is a shame. Logos used to be art; now they are right-angled chicken scratches. I know, I know, the art department made us do it so the logo will reproduce well on paper, canvas and as pixels, without distorting or suffering the jaggies. So sorry everyone, but now all the world's monochrome blocky logos look the same. Your logo no longer stands out...
Anyone else read the logo as "bup"? Just me? OK.
I'm no brand or design guru (like most people here on Slashdot) but I did rather like the other logo they had on the HP Spectre 13.
Wonder why they didn't go with that one?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I checked all my HTML tags, re-read everything a few times... But did I double check the title I pasted in? Noooooooo. How I managed to copy the tags for the story at the same time is anyone's guess.
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
Have gnu, will travel.
hp has to steal the mit press logo, can't make their own
they understand how important branding is
oh yes, what great names:
HPUX - a pox on you and your computer
OpenVMS - for the most closed-up OS ever
HP-48 - this is a calculator, but how would anyone know that?
Looks sort of similar to their logo.
The four slashes are for all the jobs they've slashed.
There is actually a lot of automated filtering going already. It's a fine line between blocking legitimate posts and making sure we can filter spam. The more users interact withe firehose, the better the content on Slashdot will be.
At one point, HP had a division called Dymec, which manufactured custom test gear, early digital data acquisition systems, and similar niche market stuff. Their logo was simply the HP logo of the day, turned upside down so it became "DY"...
http://hpmemoryproject.org/new...
http://www.hpmuseum.net/divisi...
https://www.hpplotter.co.uk/wo...
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Funny thing, the current /. DA editor puts another article in about the same laptop at the bottom of today's stuff. When will the HP H1B zombies engineer a 16 PITA-Byte RAM laptop? Or wasn't that on their final exam?
Holy Poo
I love Dairy Queen laptops
Does HP think this will spur new sales of their crappy laptops.
You're right. Computer users are no longer in that company's target demographic.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Two observations. First, there were, literally, around a hundred posts that were obvious spam (i.e. not even pretending to be news). There needs to be some mechanism to kill it easily. Perhaps people who have mod points are allowed to kill one firehose article per day (or even have one pop up on the front page and be asked 'is this spam?' - not is this good or not, just should this be rejected).
Second, it's hard to find the firehose. The only link to it is in the bar at the top that contains stupid messages that everyone ignores and it's only there sometimes. I had to refresh the front page several times before a link showed up. That's not a great way of encouraging participation. Again, why not pop one of the firehose stories onto the front page at random and ask people to vote for / against it?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We've figured out the spam issue so it should be fixed hopefully today. Also, in terms of the link, there's a link in the main nav that's always present. I've noticed on smaller browser windows though, it disappears. We are going to fix that as well.
It seems like HP got a new social media PR department to go with this new logo. I saw this story several times on Facebook, Engadget, and Reddit as well.
But, seriously, it's just a weird logo on a laptop that's too thin to be practical. Big deal. I don't want to carry around damn dongle to use an Ethernet or HDMI port!
How often do you actually use a ethernet or HDMI port? This very same complaint came up with the Macbook Air, these laptops are intended to be portable machines. The amount of times that you are going to be wanting to plug them into an external monitor or wired network is going to be low enough that having a USB-C dock sitting in a drawer is not going to be an issue.
I expect a lawsuit from Skrillex over the logo..
https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=skrillex+logo&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
I think its fair to say a good logo doesn't read upside down. This one does - it comes from a company called dy, or dg. Its mysterious as to why all social media is calling this logo 'awesome' when it is '50% functional'
I was going to reply to say that it isn't there, but then I discovered that 'smaller browser windows' includes basically anything that isn't a maximised window. If your browser is under about 1050 pixels wide, it disappears. That's significantly wider than a browser window needs to be for line wrapping to hit optimal readability on most web sites.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News