Post mentions Google Comsumer Surveys <a href="http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/pricing" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/pricing</a><p>at $0.10 for targeted and $0.50 for targeted (age , gender, etc) responses this seems like a great way for getting feedback quick. Has anyone got any experience doing them ? Does anyone know how these people answer surveys, is there a web portal for people to sign up to do them ?
I would not have said pants to start with, but now its been said, all I can see is pants. [0]<p>Maybe this is more about the power of suggestion<p>0. UK, where pants is pants and not trousers. ;)<p>Edit:
Also, pants is a UK way of saying rubbish. So, "that web site is a load of pants", might be said. Might be a sense of humor at work here.
Psh, that's not even as big a logo botch as the Brits committed to themselves: the UK Office of Government Commerce unveiled -- to much tittering and whispering -- a new "OGC" logo back in 2008 which, when rotated ninety degrees clockwise, looked like a stick figure standing and, er, "'aving a wank" in the local slang.<p>OGC quickly reverted to its old logo, correcting the er, boner, but nevertheless in some circles (particularly Reddit), "OGC" remained for some months a sort of shorthand indicating sexual arousal.
What is wrong with people thinking the logo looks like underwear? I am willing to bet people are more likely to remember the logo and company. I remember when everyone was making fun of the name "Wii", but I would be surprised if that name, which generated free publicity, did not help Nintendo.<p>If the logo reminded people of genocide, okay change it. But underwear? Seems like a good thing to me since they might remember it better.
It's odd that no one has mentioned this, but part of the reason no American thought they looked like "Y-fronts" is because American briefs don't have a Y-front. I have never seen underwear that looks like the first and third example on the rjmetrics site. If you do a comparative images search for "briefs" and "y-front" I think it'll be pretty obvious.
I still don't really see the pants, but have in the past been guilty of designing, and using for two months in production, a logo that a focus group decided was "swastika-esque."<p>So maybe don't listen to me.
The first logo is not a dodecahedron; the geometry is wrong. In reality it would be impossible to see all the three faces drawn at the edge of the logo from the same perspective.<p>Perhaps people subtly pick up on this geometric imprecision and more easily associate it with something else?
<i>"“Dodecahedron” took second place [...] followed by a laundry list of other geometric shapes."</i><p>Heh, heh, heh, he said <i>"laundry list"</i>.
Wouldn't an association with pants be better than a mere geometric shape? If it stays in ones memory for longer, then why the hell not? It's all about being recognized by the customer!
Microsoft Office 2007 came with a new feature, instead of going to the new ribbon at the top you could now highlight a chunk of text and a floating mini-toolbar would appear in which you could access the most-used commands: bold, underline, etc.<p>I remember the program manager demonstrating this to the closed group and announcing proudly that Office now had a `floater`.<p>At which point all of the Brits and South Africans either sniggered or plain exploded with laughter.<p>It took a while for things to settle before it emerged that the Americans in the room didn't see what was so funny, and the Brits and South Africans interpretation of a `floater` was a turd floating in a swimming pool.<p>The name was changed by the next time we saw the feature, if I recall correctly they went for the far less ambiguous "mini toolbar".
I don't see any underwear, but the thing definitely looks better with thinner lines. It brings out the 3d shading more. Presumably that's why more people recognise the geometry after the change.
People who thought the logo was underwear before they put it on the front page of HN: 2.6% of Britons who read their website.<p>People who thought the logo was underwear now: (How many people read a frontpage HN article?)
Small images are often confusing, see <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/misleadingthumbnails/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/misleadingthumbnails/</a>
It's funny how things like this only look like another object once someone mentions it. For example, when my step kids were little, they used to constantly ask about the "underwear" signs posted all over the place. Couldn't figure out what they were talking about, until I had them point it out sitting at a red light.<p>The traffic lights have stop signs that are folded down, and get unfolded when there are problems with the signals. So the bottom half of a white octagon does look like a pair of briefs.
The reason most of those images of underwear didn't look like their logo is because most of those pants (as us Brits refer to them as) were not proper Y-fronts.<p>If you look at this image - bar the colour / pattern of the underwear, it's actually geometrically similar (which the briefs they exampled were not)<p><a href="http://img.thesun.co.uk/aidemitlum/archive/00418/SNF14WOM01C_280_418335a.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://img.thesun.co.uk/aidemitlum/archive/00418/SNF14WOM01C...</a>
Does it really matter what 2-3% of a random sampling of people think in a single country? Could this possibly be too sensitive to trying to please too many people?
I work on translation technology, and have seen some pretty bad examples of companies choosing names that have bad connotations elsewhere.<p>One of my favorites is Evite, which means "avoid!" in Spanish, not exactly a good name for a party invite service.<p>The all time winner for badly named tech products was the Commodore Pet Computer, which was launched with great fanfare in France (and elsewhere). The only problem is pet means "fart" in French.
You don't have to be from the UK to see that that logo looks like whitey tighteys. (I'm from the US, and while the title of the article definitely solidified how I saw the logo, it still looks like men's underwear to me.)<p>I would suggest adding/removing more sides to the dodecahedron rather than rotating it... ("hendecahedron"? "nonahedron"?)
I would invest in refining that logo even further. I couldn't tell it was a decahedron until you mentioned it. I actually see more underwear in it than I do geometry. The small slivers and color shades also hinder its recognizability and limit its scalability and consistency across multiple mediums.
I think you are missing the point. The problem is that it is just not a good logo. It doesn't mean anything, it doesn't say anything about your company. If you can't come up with a good logo just make your company name the logo. Random geometric figure is not a logo.
Similar thing has happened to Yandex.Browser in Russia: <a href="http://browser.yandex.com/" rel="nofollow">http://browser.yandex.com/</a><p>A couple of vocal geeks suggested its icon looks like underpants on a sphere and now everybody thinks about that when seeing the icon.
YC-backed Survata (another consumer survey service) released a logo testing tool last month:
<a href="http://survata.com/logo-surveys" rel="nofollow">http://survata.com/logo-surveys</a><p>Startups considering new logo options should check it out!<p>Disclosure: I'm a Survata co-founder
Good tidbit in the conclusion:
"Hackathons are an amazing resource for kick-starting new ideas and proving out concepts. However, they should never be used to circumvent due diligence on big business decisions."
A similar case was a logo mentioned in previous HN:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509473" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509473</a><p>Once you see it ...
The site chooses to use the type of social media buttons that tracks users, puts them in a fixed position, and, on my browser, the buttons obscure part of the text. I don't stick around long enough on sites like this to read any articles.