"In 2 months, I imagine the designers sighing, 'What are we doing to do with the fuc****g dots today?'"
-- Media consultant and blogger Jeff Jarvis, in a tweet this morning to his 102,000 followers about USA Today's new logo, which is to be updated daily.
Related: Watch USAT's video explaining the "logo that moves."
The problem with dots is this ... it moves the conversation away from what is really wrong with USAT and puts the focus on something so trivial that it's laughable. Personally, I don't like them. I think they look juvenile -- like something created by a middle school designer for a newsletter geared towards 14-year-old video gamers. But that's a matter of taste and is irrelevant in a way.
ReplyDeleteThe dots (rebranding) aren't the worst idea in the world, just as having softer toilet paper in the Crystal Palace restrooms might be a welcomed change. But I have little confidence in a news operation that places so much emphasis on something relatively meaningless while other more substantive things are ignored.
A future headline that will become trite:
ReplyDelete"USA Today has trouble connecting the dots"
I didn't think it was possible for Banikarim's ego to get any bigger or her haters to grow even larger in numbers.
ReplyDeleteI was wrong on both counts.
For the first time ever, I agree with the self-promoting, over-sharing Jeff Jarvis.
ReplyDeleteI was eating a cheese omelet this morning at the local diner after buying one of the diner's 3 copies of USA TODAY. The other two copies were quickly scooped up by two guys in their late 60s. One of them goes: "What's this? They're printin' it different, you can hardly read it." Then they chuckled over the modified colored graphic balls and seemed to like them. But the type does appear to be smaller and compressed. It should have been rejected outright for something more legible.
ReplyDeleteToday's balls:
Blue: Civil War cannon
Red: Referee's whistle (took me a while to figure out)
Green: Ball in shopping cart
Purple: Microphone head.
DULL, DULL, DULL
ReplyDeleteThey should have had a "bake-off" with college students. At least something original would have been created.
Well, there's another $50,000,000 pissed away ..
The print is impossible to read.
ReplyDeleteWho greenlighted that font?
Problem with the dots is if it's going to change every day, what is the USAT logo? Are we just left with the boring and just plain awful block "USA TODAY" type. Will the reader get the tie-in between the editorial and the changing dot? No, they won't understand or care. Massive failure on all levels.
ReplyDelete4:07, Whether the morphing dots are a good idea or not, I don't think it's hard to make a connect between the cover dot and it being the logo. People who read aren't that dumb. Nobody chastises Google when they do it regularly -- it's seen as clever. And nobody, when they see Google's morphed logo says, "my god, I can't find the Google website!"
ReplyDelete4:41,
ReplyDeleteTwo quick things:
1) Thanks for acknowledging that we lifted the idea from Google.
2) We ain't Google.