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.

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.

After last week’s entry about Spencer Fairey taking a little too little artistic license with another person’s image, let’s start this week off with a great example of taking someone else’s idea and doing something with it.

We’re going to start with an album that some consider to be the very first true rock-n-roll record, Elvis Presley’s self-titled debut on RCA Records. When RCA purchased the 21-year-old singer’s contract from Sun Records’ owner Sam Phillips (for $35,000) Presley had only a few singles to his hame. This 1956 album was the album that introduced him to world and launched him to the stratosphere.

Twenty-some years later, in 1979 (1980 in America), The Clash released their masterpiece, London Calling. The cover of London Calling featured a very clear tribute (or was it a thumbing of the nose?) at Presley’s cover.

And now, thirty years after the Clash’s homage to the King, New York City design studio The Chopping Block has breathed new life into the image with their robotRock t-shirt.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love this shirt. I’d like to recommend that everyone go out and buy one—and I really think you should—let’s just coordinate what days we’re going to wear them, cool?

I’m a big Clash fan, so the London Calling image has been a part of my consciousness for many, many years. I never realized until a while after that it was a nod back to the Elvis album. There have been many other covers, images, parodies, etc. that have borrowed from that original Elvis album, but these are a couple of the best examples around.

So what will I design that will be toyed with for the next 50 years? Hmmmm…good question.