A Review of the APP Logo
I feel at this time I must review the logo of this site, the APP Logo. Really, I
suppose it's not a logo at all. It's just some text with some crazy
"emboss" filters applied to it in Photoshop. Is that enough? I'm not
sure.
You
see, when we started this site, back in the dank basement of members.aol.com,
we said that we were going to be different. There would be NO GRAPHICS
on our website. We wanted no long download times. No webcounters*. No frames
within frames within frames. No pop-up ads. No I Belong to The Webring of
Silly Websites crap. Just a site, with things we wrote, and a letter column.
But then we got our own domain, and at that point, it felt silly to not at
least have SOMETHING.
We thought about adding a flame to the logo, or an animated rainbow gif. Or
maybe making some of the letters be bigger than others, or have it overlap
itself a bit. We spent most of a day playing around with it. It looked so plain
there by itself. Just three simple words in 45 point, Berlin Sans FB Demi,
bold, white, with a Drop Shadow (black , 100% opacity) at a 120 degree angle,
and a Bevel and Emboss (Highlight: 100%, screen; Shadow: 50%, Multiply mode;
Style: Emboss) filter applied. It took
longer to type that than it did to create it and put it on the website.
Simplicity was what we were after, and I think we may have achieved that - but
at what cost?
Is the APP Logo simply not enough? My problem when it comes to design,
is that I have never really gotten over the coolness of a simple drop shadow.
To me, it's GREAT to just add a simple drop shadow to anything whatsoever. Add
a drop shadow, and presto! Stylized three-dimensionality! Design done! Let's go
to lunch! Add an emboss filter, and it looks like those raised letters that
used to be on lunchboxes, and that's even better!
The main failing of the APP Logo is that it does not look good against plain
white. That means if we ever do T-shirts, they will have to be black, and that
means they will be hot on sunny days. And it means that anytime we want to
actually print anything, it will have to be on a black background, which means
more ink, which means more money.
I'm
going to give the logo - such as it is - a B for simplicity, but a D in portability.
Who knows, maybe we'll change it around later on. I just don’t know!
*What is the point of them anyway?
Do you ever arrive at a website, look at their counter, and say to yourself,
"Damn! If only I could have been number 55,000!" Or "Well, less
than 345,000 people have connected to this site - I think I'll look elsewhere
for a more popular site."
© 1999 Absurd Pamphlet Press
