When in doubt, change the name, make logos

That’s the Atlanta way.  Or rather, announce news that declares some grand unification of transportation agencies in order to mask that some other umbrella-shell company is being created that will pay off a whole lot of new people for doing jack shit.

Fresh on the heels of my last post where Google put a spotlight on the unintentionally-official meaning of MARTA comes this news that Georgia is going to create a regional transit governing system that will oversee the mass transit authorities across the entire Metro Atlanta area; including MARTA.  The solution?  A new name!

The Atlantaregion Transit Linkauthority, or The ATL!  And they invented new words in the process because they don’t know how acronyms work!

In other words, the goal on paper is that supposedly by 2023, all buses, from Cobb’s CobbLink, Gwinnett’s GRTA, MARTA, and any other regional buses in Clayton or DeKalb will all be re-branded ATL buses.  All MARTA trains will be re-branded ATL trains.  The ATL transportation options will hopefully be consolidated under one brand and identity, with the theory that it will supposedly actually help boost economic viability.

What’s actually going to happen is that by 2019, the teats of all these regional transit authority will be milked by a few people who came up with this brilliant idea, they’ll make a lot of money, by 2021, The ARTLA will be all but forgotten 2022, Cobb and Gwinnett will still be afraid of black people and oppose the rebranding of their buses and in 2023, MARTA will still be MARTA, GRTA will still be GRTA, Cobb will still be vehemently opposed to black people, and Google will still spit out Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta in their queries for the meaning of MARTA.

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Real-life Difficult People

Recently I started watching Difficult People; it came recommended to me when I said that I was a big fan of Parks and Recreation.  The parallels to Parks and Rec were that it’s also single-camera shot, Amy Poehler is an executive producer, and one of the co-stars of the show is Billy Eichner, who played Tom Haverford’s flamboyantly intense sommelier in Parks and Rec. 

However, those things aside, I think the comparisons kind of cease, and so far I have to admit that I’m not quite getting into the show as I hoped I would.  Sure, the show shouldn’t be more of the same Parks and Rec formula by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ll admit the last episode I saw (Italian Piñata) was actually really funny, but what it boils down to is the fact that it’s nowhere near as good as Parks and Rec.

The thing is, the show is based on two assholes who go around acting like vapid dicks, living in a sandbox.  Difficult People doesn’t actually go anywhere, and I just recently realized that I’ve been watching the show kind of out of chronological order, but haven’t really noticed, because every episode is self-contained, and it’s just a different story of how Julie and Billy can be shitty people.  This is a far cry from the Parks and Rec formula that had a continuously forward-moving storyline with characters that grew, developed and actually cared about one another.

However, this isn’t a post about how weak Difficult People is, or how much superior Parks and Rec is over every other show (The Good Place, however, is an excellent show, coincidentally created by Michael Schur, one of the founding fathers of Parks and Rec).  What really inspired this post is the fact that I realized that there’s basically a Julie and Billy in my life right now, and that I’m sure lots of people out there have their own variants of Difficult People in their own, whether they realize it or not.

It just so happens to be coincidental that I’ve been watching this show when I came to this realization, and that the people I have in mind are, like Julie and Billy, a loud-mouthed woman and a loud-mouthed gay guy.  And unfortunately, I work with them, so I see them nearly every single working day.

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No logo > bad logo

As I’ve observed, people like having logos for things.  Whether or not they actually need one or not, there’s this innate feeling that having a logo makes something official or real for many, which I guess explains why there are so many logos out there in the first place.

Which brings us to Gwinnett County unveiling what’s supposedly going to be their new logo and identity; naturally, it’s hot garbage, and basically a blatant rip-off of well, Google.  It looks like the Chrome logo, and the font is almost identical to Google/Alphabet’s typeface.

Seriously, it’s basically the Chrome logo, if the Chrome logo extended their primary colors further into the center of the circle and had the colors overlap.  But in the case of the Gwinnett logo, the overlapping doesn’t even make sense; red and blue make purple, not yellow, and green and red or blue makes some pukey colors, instead of light blue or light green.  This is some light urple kind of color theory we got going on here.

And then we get to the county’s new slogan, “vibrantly connected” in all lower case no less.  Because lower case is casual and not shouting, and the handwritten typeface tries to double down on that kind of feel.  I’m not sure what it means to be connected vibrantly, because I think a connection is a connection; whether it’s done with energy or not, once a connection is made, it doesn’t seem like something that can be measured quantitatively.

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Having logo ≠ entitled success

People seem to like having logos.  Logos for themselves, logos for their businesses, companies or other identities that they feel necessitate some sort of visual symbolization so that they can hope to one day be easily identifiable by an image and not even need words.

However, for every single Nike, Honda, Target and even Chili’s that have successfully ingrained their visual identities with the people for so long that they don’t even have to use actual words in their branding anymore, there are probably a million failures of logos in the world for people, businesses and other entities that in all likelihood, abandoned their ideas not long after concepting their logos in the first place.

It’s like logo design always seems to come first, and then people think they can build around it, or so it seems, based on the frequency in which this tends to occur.  Coming soon businesses announce their presences with nothing more than a generic press release and a logo often way too abstract to interpret.  Restaurants that haven’t opened yet unveil logos, signs and the visual identities of their menus before they’ve even served a plate of food.  And then there are the thousands of pleebs who think they have a great idea for a project, but before they launch anything, they make themselves a logo, share it on social media to farm likes, but then the drive to actually do anything with their project, it runs out of steam and then they log into Steam and play video games, but not after a poor logo is left and abandoned on the internet for others to witness their fleeting false dedication.

Anyway, I’m sidetracking here which is nothing out of the ordinary since I have a tendency to poorly veil rants about other things in posts that initially are spurred by a slightly relevant topic.

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Why change a solid logo?

Supposedly, there are rumblings that the NBA needs to change its logo.  The Undefeated has made a game of potential silhouettes to replace Jerry West; naturally being The Undefeated, ten of them are black guys, and then Larry Bird, almost like an obligation to option out a non-black guy as to not seem too obvious. But the question I really have is, why??  Why change the NBA logo?  There’s nothing at all wrong with it!

This isn’t like the Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves or any other sports team name that triggers white guilt and is always in the conversation of needing to be changed because they’re construed as offensive.  This isn’t like the Vietnamese skin care center that uses a logo that’s too infringe-y to an existing copyright and needs to be changed, so people don’t mistake them as manufacturers of zombie serum.  Or this isn’t like, Wendy’s, whose prior wild western-looking type face made their brand look as old as the era in which the font best represents.

The NBA logo is an icon in itself, and has no need for change, especially for no good reason other than the sake of change.  It doesn’t help when Jerry West, the alleged basis of the silhouette in the logo is all white-guilty and is clamoring for a change as well, but thankfully the NBA themselves continues to deny it as to deny leverage to West.

But really, there’s no need for change.  What for?  MLB has never changed their logo, and you better fucking believe that the NFL isn’t going to change their logo.  Stability and longevity is what gives strength to logos, and the NBA would be flushing 70+ years of tradition and history down the toilet because the world feels like change should occur on some basis other than never, for everything, including long standing identities and brands. 

Brands that want to last and thrive know how to commit and stick with something for the long haul.  The NBA changing their logo for no real good reason is a stupid idea, and I hope they never actually do it.

I’m on PayPal’s side

I never really noticed it, because I’m a human being that has a functional brain and knows how to read things before I press buttons, but apparently, there are actually people out there who get tripped up by the similarities between the PayPal logo and the Pandora logo, and now PayPal is suing Pandora for trademark infringement.

Consumerist accuses PayPal of going a little too far in dragging Pandora’s reputation onto the ground, to which they’re not entirely wrong, but I think you also kind of have to think of if you were PayPal; another well-known entity out there has basically lifted your identity and colors, and dumb people are confusing someone else with you.  That’d piss me off too, and make me say some unpleasant things publicly, if it helps expedite a resolution.

Ultimately, PayPal’s redesign came first, so in my opinion, they have the high ground in this debate.  And I think they do have some ground to stand on, because sure, Pandora is only one P versus two, but it also doesn’t help that the blue gradient within the Pandora P is basically mixed out of the two solid blue swatches that make up both of PayPal’s P’s.

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The adaptation period, I suppose

Last night, I couldn’t sleep.  Not because I took a nap earlier in the day or because I drank too much caffeine, my brain was simply too actively thinking to the point of where it was compromising my ability to fall asleep.  The selling of my house and the subsequent reconfiguration of life was undoubtedly a substantial change, but with the change has come some new lines of thinking as the result of the murky waters of what new paths lie ahead of me in the course of my life.

The one very particular thing that my brain was wrestling with throughout the evening was, something that I haven’t really given that much thought to in the past, other than cursory ideas that never were taken very seriously, resulting myself to fall back into my content little bubble of routine.  I’m talking about my career, as a graphic designer.  Lately, I feel like I’ve been tapping at the ceiling of my current career path, and unless I want to resign myself to staying dormant and padding years doing what I do, I can do that, but then the result of such a choice leads to a lot of fairly time-consuming and not necessarily very lofty end games, that I’d question if I’d be content with when I’m well into my 40s and 50s.

It’s not so much the career I’ve been feeling some discontent with, it’s also the money that comes along with what I do.  Honestly, I’ve never really been that driven by money; I know what I like to make in order to live comfortably within my means, but I’m also not blind to the working world around me, and that there are plenty of other designers with specializations more attuned to the current creative market, that make noticeably more money than I do, albeit with an equally proportionate higher risk of job security than I have.  But there are plenty of those in the creative marketplace that make more money than I do, and up until recently, I’ve been fine with that.

But I think I’ve been content over the last 13 years living in a household where the combined income was one that was pretty well into the upper-middle class echelon, and now that I’m basically on my own now, such numbers don’t look nearly as promising or conveying potential for loan repayment when it comes to planning for the future, like another house.  Suddenly, I’m feeling like my earning capabilities aren’t just inadequate, but not necessarily conducive to saving at a rate that would make the future not feel like too far away.

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