New logos and old.

The Red Wheelbarrow
--William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

I’ve always believed in the profundity of the William Carlos Williams above. That so much depends upon little touches of god in the serendipity of life. I believe in beautiful purple skies over a roiling city. I believe in a precise and surprising turn of a phrase that brings a smile or stimulates a thought. I believe in the wonders of an artistic touch, of looking at old things in new ways.

That said, I think 99% of the design crap we as an industry obsess over makes as much difference as spending a quarter from 2015 as opposed to spending a quarter from 2013.

One of our current industry obsessions is slight tweaks to logos.

A lot of ink was spilled when Yahoo changed theirs. But guess what? Yahoo is still irrelevant.

Google could render their logo in cuneiform and I’m still not switching to Alta Vista.

As for Verizon, they were a hateful company of rapacious oligarchs when their logo was a series of juxtaposed Nazi runes. They’re a hateful company now with their slightly better logo. They’d be a hateful company if their logo were nothing but smiley faces and unicorn feces.

I’m not for a second saying logos don’t matter. But they don’t matter much if the company behind them blows.

As Willy Loman found out in “Death of a Salesman,” life demands more than a handshake and a smile.

Redesign your logo all you want. It’s all but meaningless if it’s not representative of your deeper values as an entity.