
Forget Rand Paul, Let's Talk Paul Rand - Mz
http://us9.campaign-archive2.com/?u=dfa53e03a5aa8e49e4fb09eb0&id=3b28f46546
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tptacek
Google's job is to show the search results that most closely match what users
are actually looking for. In 2015, far more Google users are looking for Rand
Paul than Paul Rand. Would that it weren't so, but it is. Paul Rand's logos
might touch millions of people every day, but Rand himself is not _relevant_
to the majority of Google users.

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greghendershott
I'd say that Google's job is to show the search results that _each_ user is
actually looking for. (Not an aggregate user with 2.5 children.)

Come to think of it, doesn't Google aspire to personalized search? But in any
case, at least I'd like old-fashioned quoted search -- i.e. I want "this
phrase" exactly -- to give useful results.

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jader201
I didn't think phrase matching (quotes) was ever broken? I know Google dropped
the "+" filter a while back, but I still continue to use phrase matching quite
heavily, and it seems to still work as it always has.

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82xx
The string matching is fuzzy though. It is case insensitive and it ignores at
least some non-alphanumeric characters.

For example, "twenty-four" will return results about the TV show "Twenty Four"
as well as results for "twenty four" and "twenty-four".

There's some other maddening exceptions for those who would prefer exact
string matching, but I can't remember them all and it's changed over the years
too.

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darkstar999
> The logo is hard to read at a distance

What?? No, it's literally 4 letters with a flame above it, it can't get much
simpler.

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clay_to_n
"You may have to squint to get the message that it's trying to get across"

I think he's referring specifically to the torch imagery. From far away it
mostly just looks like a word with a dot above it. The torch deal is small in
comparison to the letters.

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shortformblog
Author here—yep, this was my intention. Sure, you can make out the letters,
but the liberty imagery is lost if you're looking from half a mile. Look at
the Obama logo (for example), and it holds up better. The Hillary logo, for
all its faults, will similarly hold up better at long distances because the
imagery is simple.

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guelo
What is a logo for a political campaign good for? It is used to try to create
some kind of positive impression on voters based on the visual design. Visual
marketing in general is about trying to hack the human brain's bugs in order
to influence it. Their is little actual information that is communicated, it
is all about manipulating the lizard brain. This kind of hacking is awful for
democracy. Voters should be encouraged to use their rational brains as much as
possible when making these decisions. I consider it immoral and think it
should be frowned upon.

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afarrell
I am genuinely surprised to learn that Rand Paul is not named after Ayn Rand.

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iwwr
His name was Randy, which he shortened to Rand when he got married, at the
behest of his wife. There could be some tenuous connection to Ayn Rand, but he
has not acknowledged it. He definitely knows about Ayn Rand and her
philosophy, as does his dad (Ron Paul).

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bmelton
To be more precise, at least according to his father, his name is "Randall".
"Randy" is a nickname, as is "Rand".

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afarrell
Ah okay. Then I'll bet an oak tree against an acorn that he adopted the
nickname as an allusion to Ayn Rand.

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gweinberg
Do Presidential candidates usually have logos? Before today I didn't know Rand
Paul had one. In fact, the only one I had seen other than Hillary's was
Obama's.

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researcher88
Rand had a cool limited bumper sticker silhouette with just his first name,
like this. Seemed like good
branding-[http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5522b0ec6da811ae3f3...](http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5522b0ec6da811ae3f3e025e-1069-381/mad%20man%20vs%20rpaul%202.jpg)

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wyclif
Where is his first name? I don't see it in this image.

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bmelton
He linked an unrelated image. The one he was talking about is this one:

[https://store.randpaul.com/get.php/media/catalog/product/cac...](https://store.randpaul.com/get.php/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/r/a/rand_1024_4x6_ovalbumpersticker_limited_blue2.jpg)

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wyclif
Thanks, I'd actually never seen that one.

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kriro
I think the most interesting point is that the logo was crowd sourced (and
used SVG) which I didn't know before. The logo seems fine to me but the
process is pretty exciting.

The author of the blog post seems to think the crowd sourcing is not the
greatest idea and it should be "left to the pros". I disagree with that
general sentiment, why shouldn't wisdom of the crowds also apply to design
tasks? At the very least it's dismessed a bit too quickly.

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shortformblog
Hi, author here. I'm not personally opposed to the idea of crowdsourcing, nor
the idea of changing a logo as needed—I respect Rand Paul for doing this,
actually.

But I was writing that section of the piece with the assumption that _Paul
Rand_ might not like it, considering that some of his commentary near the end
of his life (in the early age of computers) questioned the negative effects
that democratized design, specifically through desktop publishing, had on
visual identity.

Design has gotten better online in recent years, and many more people are
handy at Photoshop/InDesign than they were two decades ago, but this
philosophy was one common in the early desktop publishing age, when people
commonly screwed up things like kerning, typographers' quotes, and so on.

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tedunangst
> This is a situation where someone who has had more influence on millions
> more lives than Rand Paul ever might

There's a statement I'd love to see quantified.

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mitchi
Very interesting. Great designs. Now I know who is Paul Rand and hopefully, a
little more aboutt the importance of logo design.

