Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
Every large company has branding standards and most are very strict about how they are used. This is not limited to HP.
Time makes more converts than reason
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."
Honestly, I think the whole point of Slashdot is to incite discussion. You get a lot of interesting insights from discussion topics that are only tangentially related to the opening post. As a nerd who cares about stuff that matters, I'm personally not averse to articles like this appearing in the feed because half the time, there are cool little tidbits from readers buried in the comments.
Anyone who spent that much time enforcing logo display deserved to go out of business.
You have just described the entire fortune 500 portfolio. When companies get to the point where their logo is valuable or their products are worth forging there are good reasons to enforce incredibly strict logo rules. This can be to:
a) show consistency
b) drive a certain message (i.e. our branding standards include which colours can cover which part of a page and a based on psychological studies of how people react to colours).
c) ensure that the brand is advertised in a consistent way; which ties into:
d) fight forging, when you're always 100% sure of exactly how a product is supposed to look it makes it easier to spot the fakes, especially since the fakes often make minor modifications to the logo to avoid falling afoul of trademark laws which are about the only laws that apply properly in much of the world.
I once had to redesign a product because the printing proof showed a single colour of the logo slightly differently due to a supplier changing printers. And when I say slightly differently it was resolved by increasing the yellow colour by 2 values (out of 256). I couldn't tell the difference side by side between the printed copies but the brand team could.
Logo and branding are VERY specific and related closer to trademark then to copyright. There are always forms and papers on how the logo should look, what colors must be used, what if it is in black and white and a lot of other things.
It is like using different glasses for different beers. This is NOT to have a different taste, this is so people see what beer you are drinking.
e.g. Stella Artois is just an average beer and in Belgium they compete with themselves (Jupiler). So what did they do to make Stella a premium beer? They changed the glass. Not the beer, the way the glass looked.
So perhaps they deserve to go out of business in your opinion, but most ikely they wont (for that reason) because they understand how important branding is and apparently you don't.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.