Fun With Logos
2005-11-21 22:28:23
SBC is buying AT&T, and is adopting the brand name of good old Telephone. That's a smart move, because I'll bet 3/4 of Americans have no idea who or what SBC is. But they are changing the logo. Russell Beattie has a little write-up on how idiotic the new logo is. I think he might be overstating it a bit, because the old logo was met with some ridicule when it was introduced. The AT&T "death star" logo isn't quite as recognizable as the IBM logo, the Apple logo, the Dell logo... hmmm, sensing a pattern?
The pointless blue globe never added anything to the brand to begin with. How does a blue ball relate to AT&T? It's sort of like "the earth" and AT&T is a company on the earth? It never made much sense to me, but I'm certainly no designer.
Seems like it would have been a better investment to refocus the design on the letters: AT&T. I'll bet a talented person could do some nice work with just those letter.
I'm very sensitive to this, because right now the company I work for is picking its own logo. We've got a branding firm, and two final designs to choose between. It's not at all clear which is the right one. I hope we don't pick the equivalent of the pointless blue globe, but only hindsight will tell us which one that is...