It’s no great surprise that AOL has taken a pretty good beating in blogs around the world the past few weeks, after introducing their new…um…logoish thing. I was one of MANY, MANY people who took the time to comment on the logo and almost all of the commentary has been negative. It seems that almost everybody has a reason to hate the logo.

Alissa Walker wrote an article for Fast Company, allowing branding firm Wolff Olins to tell their side of the story. While I am not sold on the somewhat tongue-in-cheek explanation that the new AOL logo is the logo of the future, I think that AOL’s management and Wolff Olins make a good case for themselves. I don’t buy AOL chief of staff Maureen Sullivan’s explanation that scrapping the old name is “the lazy consultant answer,” I can certainly appreciate the idea of hiring Wolff Olins at least in part because they were in the very small minority who advised them to keep the name.

Have you ever heard the old saying about when you’re in a panic situation and everybody is heading for the exits, you’re better off heading in the direction they’re coming from because you stand a better chance of getting out alive? I can appreciate that. I think, were I asked, I’d advise AOL to keep the name simply because AOL is an icon, so I agree with keeping the name.

Again, I don’t care for the changing imagery behind the logo, but the imagery isn’t supposed to be the logo. The logo is the Aol. wordmark in front of the image. If you go to the Wolff Olins home page (linked above), watch the video. It’s a good demonstration of how the logo “works” in a motion environment. The videos produced are, as Walker says in her piece, quite good and make a strong case for the “invisible wordmark.”

I still think they’d be better served by having identified one image as their flagship logo for print purposes, but I at least get what they were going for. I don’t know that it’s the future of design, but I have to admit that I like their out-of-the-box thinking.

Even if you don’t care for the new logo, Wolff Olins certainly gets an A for process and creative thinking. So kudos there, Wolff Olins.

What I’m most curious to see now is how many people start mimicking the style? I only wish I could put together a graph correlating the number of mimics with the number of critics, because you can bet your ass that there is going to a lot of crossover in those two groups. We hate it today, but we can’t wait to steal it.

Today’s lesson comes from the pages of one of America’s great creative minds—Woody Allen. Sure, his best days are behind him, but that’s only because his early work (read: Annie Hall) was masterful.

Woody Allen was quoted once as saying, “80 percent of success is just showing up.”

Often when I am speaking to high school or college classes, the question of how to be successful designer comes up. And more often than not, I quote Woody’s wisdom because it is an absolute truth that applies not just to filmmaking and graphic design, but just about any other path in life you choose to follow.

The best example of not showing up is something that happened recently in my attempt to have a print project quoted by a printer. I am not going to name the printer, but I will tell you that it wasn’t F.P. Horak, McKay Press or QRP. Those are the three printers I use most often and I don’t want anyone to think that I’m talking about them.

This particular project, I thought, was a good fit for another printer in the region. The printer in question threw up every single roadblock they could come up with along the way. Honestly, it was as if they didn’t want my work.

My first step was to find their website to get contact info. The Google search took while because I wasn’t 100% sure of their name (they have gone through some ownership changes). With the correct site located, I clicked through to look for contact info and trouble ensued.

Their site is a wide-awake nightmare. I couldn’t find the information I was looking for, contact info was buried, sales department names and e-mail addresses weren’t available, etc. I didn’t want to fill out a form to wait for a response because my experience with these forms is that response time tends to be slower.

I was able to locate a phone number, though, so I called which led me to a pain-in-the-ass phone tree. If you don’t know the name of the person you are trying to reach, you’re directed to a general mailbox. Since I couldn’t find any sales rep names online, I would be stuck in the general mailbox which often isn’t much better than filling out the online form, where response time is concerned.

I call back and hit zero a few times and get through to a live person. I explain that I need a quote and she isn’t sure who she needs me to get to. After some confusion on her part, I just ask for a customer service rep and says she’ll connect me to the person I need to talk to. The call goes through to an extension which promptly hangs up on me. I call back again and ask if I can speak to a living, breathing customer service rep, but because I don’t have an account manager, she can’t direct me to a CSR.

Finally, in frustration, I give up. The job was a perfect fit for them and it will be printing elsewhere. It isn’t the hugest job in the world, but it would probably be somewhere between 5–10 grand every month or two. How many jobs like this do they lose in the course of a week? There were several opportunities along the way for them to save the interaction, but they managed to miss at every step. All they had to do was show up, but they phoned it in and missed out on a decent, little revenue stream.

There is actually a humorous postscript to the story, too. About one week after being unable to get a quote, I actually get a call from the sales manager wanting to sell me on doing my printing with them. I told him that I was surprised to hear from him and told him all about what had happened the prior week. He is both grateful for the candid input and assures me that is not the way they do business. He asks if he could send me some material to look at about them and maybe set up a meeting. I understand that every business has bad days, so I tell him to send the info and we’ll get together after that.

Five weeks later and guess what…nothing ever showed up.

Chuckleheads.

A few more versions of the new AOL logo. Er…make that the Aol. logo.

Does anybody remember when America Online was the 400-pound gorilla of the online world? There were many ways to go online, but AOL made the whole process very easy. AOL put together a marketing plan that included mailing CDs with their software to every man, woman, child and family pet in North America. The plan worked, though, as people were signing up as fast as AOL could send the CDs out. For years, this was the first thing you saw on the screen, just before hearing the ubiquitous, “You’ve got mail.”

While the logo isn’t great, it’s not horrible, either. It’s just sort of there. I know that a lot of designers really hated this logo, but to be honest, I was on AOL before I was designer so the logo is very familiar to me. It’s not great, but it brings back good memories from the early days of the internet (granted, 1991 wasn’t that long ago, but it was still long before many people knew much about it).

As AOL continued to grow (and grow and grow), they decided to updated the logo to be more in step with the time. In 2004, the logo was given a more contemporary feel. Strangely, the new logo was to be part of the 20th anniversary celebration of AOL, but that was still seven years in the future.

Fast forward to 2009 and we’re still 2 years shy of the 20th anniversary and AOL finds itself facing a business climate change which they didn’t anticipate. Between DSL, cable modems, wireless networks and so forth, the need to have a dedicated service to connect to the internet is no more. There are still people who use AOL, but the numbers are WAY DOWN from the good, old days. AOL needs to find a way to make themselves relevant in order to survive in the current environment. Step one in that process is, apparently, a major rebranding. Behold the future…

…that’s right, it’s a goldfish. In other versions of the logo the goldfish is replaced with a green scribble, some sort of weird brain thing or any of many other little icons with an updated type treatment. AOL’s big branding brains came up with a whole slew of icons. Their explanation (excuse, is more like it) for this is that AOL is a 21st century media company and that required a brand that is “open and generous.”

Um…yeah…whatever. Just call it what it is…we don’t know who the hell we are, who we’re supposed to be or what you want us to be. So we’ll just be everything.

Can you believe some people get paid to come up with a goldfish with type on top of it? Assuming they were paid for the design work (and I use design loosely), they should be locked up for larceny.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then you can consider me quite flattered. Imagine my surprise recently when I saw a couple of ideas clearly lifted straight from the 989 Design portfolio.

This is, of course, the 989 Design logo:

Then as I was browing one day, I see this:

Ad Index guys, you’re embarassing me with your clear imitation of my logo. I did, after all, invent the red circle with reversed out characters.

And then to further the flattery, I refer you to the Great Lakes Loons Man of Steal poster:

Four or five weeks later, I was sitting in Brewtopia when I spotted the cover of the new Tri-City Magazine:

Stop it, you guys, you’re making me blush! I really appreciate that so many people have taken the time to mimic my work but you’re embarrassing me with all of this imitation.

Okay, to be clear, I’m being very tongue-in-cheek about this. Neither Ad Index nor Tri-City Magazine copied my work. There are trends in design and there are good ideas that happen simultaneously. Each of these is a case of  coincidence. It’s just dumb luck that I spotted the Ad Index logo (haven’t been able to find it since), but when I saw it the 989 logo was the first thing I thought of. As far as the TCM cover, that’s just a funny coincidence that we each had a Superman idea at the same time. I’ll take my Superman over theirs, though, because while Mike (on the magazine cover) is a great guy and a great golfer, Dee is going to be playing for the Dodgers one day.