
An iterative look at logo / icon design - randall
http://blog.yobongo.com/post/3294786878/designing-the-yobongo-icon
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farlington
This is a beautiful icon, but I'm going to risk saying something unpopular
here. This is less a design exercise than it is an application of current
design trends. Linen textures, subtle gradients, noisy gradients, glowing
text—even the controversial iTunes 10 glow—are all everywhere. And while they
look cool, they do nothing to distinguish your brand from anyone else
following the same trends.

~~~
tel
Brushed Metal and Glow is the new Individualized Helvetica Nameplate on Stark
White Paper (Just Like Everyone Else). It's hopelessly derivative and is
rapidly having its meaning and impact sucked dry. It's also a pretty effective
signal for (1) I hired a designer because (2) this is a high quality Mac/iOS
application.

I don't really have a problem with it and it kicks the pants off an icon that
didn't get that kind of workup in terms of visceral Polish, but as others have
noted, it pretty much tells no story of the app at all. I'm not even
interested enough to click on their header and learn.

That's fine though. Commodity design doesn't have to have an impact, and I
prefer a world where commodity design is valuable and practiced over one where
people just don't care.

~~~
spiralganglion
I would prefer a world where people take risks attempting to forge their
iconography with meaning at the expense of stylistic visual polish, to one
where hollow aesthetics are seen as an alternative to ugliness.

~~~
tel
As would I, but the harsh reality seems to be that the demand is not direct
enough to support that kind of effort. That intangible "passion" is not
extrinsically motivated, and mass audience isn't willing to forgo convenience
in the search of it.

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colinplamondon
Terrible logo for getting actual downloads- implies nothing about what the app
does.

With App Store marketing you have to describe your app with just the title and
logo. By punting on logo you're losing 50% of your descriptive levers for
getting rank traffic.

~~~
wallflower
Some context to back the authoritativeness of Colin's statement:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745858>

[http://spreadsong.com/icon_driven_development_on_the_app_sto...](http://spreadsong.com/icon_driven_development_on_the_app_store_how_we_make_350day_without_marketing)

~~~
alanfalcon
After reading that blog post I checked out the company and saw... another
bookshelf icon?

<http://spreadsong.com/>

Tried to find more info, but the Spreadsong blog seems to be MIA without a
direct link to a specific entry.

~~~
colinplamondon
We changed it six months ago- once we were able to afford the design talent to
make a good go of it.

<http://cl.ly/3O3H300K3C3p423G2i2Z>

It's another bookshelf icon, but the colors and style make it stand out in the
app store listings.

Key is to stand out relative to competition, in the common ways users find
your app.

Downloads and sales have more than doubled since the change, though we also
redesigned the app interface itself in the same update.

~~~
dkasper
I might be biased as one of the cofounders, but I find that the Yobongo icon
stands out pretty well relative to the myriad of blue-ish icons.

<http://i.imgur.com/VtYUJ.png>

The strong border sets the icon apart, and in fact I notice that you have a
similar border in your icon!

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maxklein
The app is about chatting with people _near_ you. First of all, that's been
done before...many times, and it has not worked yet. Secondly, if they are
spending so much time & money on just an icon, and ending up with an icon that
does not work well in the app store, then they clearly have no clue what they
are doing.

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shaggyfrog
Am I the only one to think that icons that prominently feature a letter to
represent the app aren't very... iconic? Is this from the school of thought
that gave rise to Adobe's adoption of their new "icons"?

Thankfully this pattern seems to be more rule than exception. Very few of the
icons in my Dock have letters (or glyphs) in them at all. Notably, Skype uses
a big S in some circle-y kinda thing, X11 has the "X" and Angband uses some
vaguely Asian-looking thing.

~~~
spiralganglion
Checklist for a powerful brand:

1) An icon where the name of the object depicted in the icon is the name of
the company or product. 2) A company/product name that's also a common noun,
but not so common that search results for the noun overpower search results
for the company/product. Depends on the prominence of the product/company, of
course. 3) A domain name that is the exact company/product name.

Eg: Apple.

Good luck finding something that matches these requirements!

I'm half-joking, of course. In all seriousness, I 100% agree with you. Icons
should be graphic, not textual. They should be expressive, not descriptive.

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iamcalledrob
This is all style with no substance.

Looking at the icon, I have no clue what it's for.

~~~
spiralganglion
Style with no substance: isn't that what's "hot" right now?

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sambeau
A Y in a box. I wonder if they considered doing it in orange?

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r00fus
It would have helped to see the mobile icon in context (ie, on an iPhone
homepage or dock/shelf)... hard to see the faults with the brightness without
seeing the "pudding".

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erickhill
I find it interesting that so many top-tier social offerings leverage various
shades of blue (facebook, twitter, yammer, linkedin). There are multiple
psychology discussions (color theory, herd mentality, etc.) in there
somewhere.

To be honest, at first glance I was reminded of Yammer's iPhone icon. But I
think this treatment stands on its own.

Very much like Yobongo publicly discussing their brand's visual evolution.

~~~
spiralganglion
This is a great infographic for an overview of the prominent colors of the
web:
[http://static.colourlovers.com.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/imag...](http://static.colourlovers.com.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/images/top-
web-brand-colors.html)

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some1else
Visual balance.. The Y is too far left. You could have started with the simple
and effective version you ended up with, not the "clever-negative-space" one.
Abstraction provides better results when you have something to take away from.
See if you can get an interesting result going the other way (removing instead
of adding) from your current final design.

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michaelpinto
Paul Rand designed the famous NeXT logo for Steve Jobs — do you think Steve
made one change to it? No. <http://www.paul-rand.com>

~~~
cpeterso
I read that Paul Rand said (something to the effect of) a great logo could be
drawn in sand with your finger and still be recognizable.

~~~
michaelpinto
All of his logos had that! In fact I think a real good test of a brand is if
you can blur the logo and still recognize it. Of course part of that is the
ability to saturate the mass media with your brand — and Rand was part of that
golden age.

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Vlasta
Congrats to having the guts to drop the reflections! They may seem sexy on the
first sight, but make the icons unsuitable for long term usage.

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bpeters
Continuous iteration towards continuous improvement! That final logo design is
very good and clean.

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neeraga
Nice logo design. :)

Neeraj Agarwal

