Shechner: Sun Microsystems
I’m certainly not the first to say this, but you know what’s frickin’ awesome? The sun.
Yes, the sun is totally rad. If you’ve never noticed the enormous nuclear furnace that created, illuminates, heats, fuels and will one day inevitably consume our world, then odds are you live in the North East. Check it out, though; it’s arguably the second most powerful mindless ball of flaming gas in our solar system. And being as powerful–literally and symbolically–as it is, Earth’s favorite G2V-class* star has understandably become the totemic inspiration for all sorts of stuff. The major world religions come to mind. But way more importantly, so do a bunch of consumer products. A lot of these products use Solar imagery to adorn their brand logo, as well. It’s the modern day take on a time-honored tradition that (A) avoids the need for consumers to read anything, and (B) clarifies any problems people might have with homonyms. Besides, the meta-discourse between the average American consumer and the Brands they consume doesn’t exactly parallel the Lincoln-Douglas debates:
Capri Sun, eh? Is it made with Capri pants?
Nope. That would be a ridiculous waste of our nation’s precious Capri Pant resources.
Well, then your name is totally misleading.
It is made using the Sun, you know.
Why should I believe that?
There’s totally the ghosted image of a sun behind the logo text. Check it out.
Oh yeah! Now there’s no need for me to read the ingredients label!
&c…
So then, what to expect from the company which–rather than merely evoking Solar imagery, or deriving their name from its primal, archaic power–just takes the name whole hog unto itself? Here’s what we get:
Honk if you love C4 plane-group symmetry! …. HONK!
Now, a logo is ultimately the face that a brand uses to address its market, and I’d argue that on those terms, Sun Microsystems has created one of the most effective logos of all time. For, who is their market? It’s the sort of person who’d probably answer my opening question a bit differently:
You know what’s frickin’ awesome?
High-End Multi-Node Supercomputing Clusters.
In short, their logo, their brand identity, is Nerd-Fracking-Core. It doesn’t make any effort to evoke the actual Sun itself, lest your interpretation of the Sun be the unholy love-child of a German Expressionist painting and a Tangram. I mean, though our depictions may vary, people tend to agree that the Sun is (A) round, and (B) yellow. Yet the above image is exactly the way a true computer geek would represent it. After all, (A) Squarish things are easier to stack than round things, so this is more efficient, (B) They haven’t actually been outside in about five years, and (C) Look, buddy. Unless you’re here to debate which Linux distribution is superior, I need to get back to writing code, now.
<Snorts, pushes glasses up onto bridge of nose.>
This is a logo that accomplishes by doing, not by showing. Why show the sun itself? Sure, the name of the company is Sun, and one could pay $20 to a graphic design major at the local community college to make some shitty logo where a smiling Sun craps out mainframes all over some unicorns or what not, but what’s the point? Just let the logo be the name and nothing else… But then, the logo isn’t the *actual* name; there’s no S in it. Instead, it’s a grouping of smaller, discrete elements which, when viewed at the macroscopic level, appear to represent the S. AND, when these are assembled, they’re concatenated to give this circular, self-calling loop system: something remarkably evocative of the binary computation process itself. Remember, computers are machines that employ nested levels of abstraction to convert 1’s and 0’s into representations of text, color, sound, or (statistically speaking) photos of naked people doing unspeakable acts to one another.
The Sun Microsystems logo is hence a visual metaphor not just for this particular company’s identity, but for the identity of computation itself. To stare upon it is to know the inner workings of a mind that says, “Anything that exists can be coded; anything that can be coded is better in code than it was when it existed.”
Truly, with such mighty imagery on their side, it’s obvious that Sun will be a force to be reckoned with for some time.
(*-Suck on it, Alpha Centauri)
Good symbols should not be bastardizable (that a word?). The Christian cross is to simple. It has been tweaked, perverted, adorned or otherwise adapted to the subdivision of Christianity.
The Red Cross gets major points for universality and it will likely win because it is most recognizable versus best all around.
American Apparell is just ripping off the Gap from the 80’s(? – egads was it that long ago). Sun has a good logo, just like Nabisco and Nike, but it’s just good.
Which leaves Starbucks. The damn thing is so unique, ubiquitious, and uniformly represented that it beats the Red Cross. Sure, we associate the Red Cross with video game powerups. Did you know that they are in charge of getting messages to military members on the front lines? Did you know that they shot into fame by helping out at the Jamestown flood, by bringing both supplies and a PR crew. They do blood drives, they do so many things that people don’t think about instantly.
Green Mermaid lady -> instantly we think ofcoffee, wifi, music, done.
I wish I knew you folks were actually writing up the worst logo, because I would have chimed in. The worst logo is clearly the universal radiation warning sign. It is, in fact, so ineffective a logo (from certain angles it looks like an angel), that the U.S. Department of Energy and the EPA spent years trying to replace it with something that better signified, “Stay away from this shit! It will melt your eyes!”
Check it: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160
I’ve been a big fan of the Sun logo for years, for precisely the reasons mentioned. The argument for the Red Cross was compelling, though.
@Wrather: I know Starbuck is from Moby Dick, but I didn’t remember that he had a coffee fixation. Incidentally, the Starbucks people were originally planning on calling their store either Pequod or Moby’s Coffee, depending on which account you read. I do like the fact that, thanks to the ubiquity of Starbucks coffee, all three mates in Moby Dick are now named after chemical dependencies (the other two being Stubb (i.e. of a cigar) and Flask (i.e. of hooch.)
@Mlawski: You’re totally right. Now, the international biohazard symbol, on the other hand – you know, the one they put on medical waste and the like – that one looks like it would slice you up reeaal good, just for making eye contact.
What about the Jesus Fish, then?
I would have voted for SBux, but apparently I missed the deadline. Where are the results?
My vote goes for Christianity’s Cross. The Red Cross was close, though, The Jesus Fish is a symbol, and thus lacks the power that puts the crucifixion’s cross at the top.
Sun Microsystems strange shapes actually looks like S’s, but are also obviously U’s and N’s. Holy Crap!