What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the <i>Vote Leave</i> organisation in the 2016 Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for <i>Vote Leave</i>:<p>&gt; The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dominiccummings.substack.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;117842715&#x2F;where-did-take-back-control-come-from" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dominiccummings.substack.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;117842715&#x2F;where-did-t...</a>

I always go back to the Saul Bass presentation to AT&amp;T over their 1970 logo redesign. He takes <i>30 minutes</i> to explain the thought process and sell this design <i>hard</i>. By the end you&#x27;re convinced it&#x27;s the natural thing to do. I&#x27;m sure every executive in the room felt the same way.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI</a><p>(Bass would return a mere 13 years later to do the AT&amp;T &quot;Death Star&quot; logo after the breakup)

&gt; Set in all capitals, the word NEXT is sometimes confused with EXIT possibly because the EXT grouping is so dominant. A combination of capitals and lower case letters alleviates this problem.<p>Huh. Never knew why the &#x27;e&#x27; was lowercased until now. I thought it was just &quot;style&quot;.

As a graphic designer, it was the way Paul Rand pitched the design that was the major breakthrough for me. Through interviews you can see how he pitched himself and his process to Steve Jobs. Paul&#x27;s confidence in his process, backed up with his experience, is what sold Jobs on using Paul Rand and gave me the blueprint in how to deal with clients.<p>People don&#x27;t realize that a logo is an empty vessel that is filled with the peoples experiences of the company and product, it has to be the correct vessel. People online see a logo for the first time and judge it without any knowledge of the company or product, which is fine but not really helpful. Interact with the company and product and then judge the logo after time has passed.

The presentation at NeXT office was recorded and is available on youtube:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OUTxtvlyJDc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OUTxtvlyJDc</a>

I might be in the minority, but the NeXT logo never looked good to me - there&#x27;s something off with projection of the cube.

I loved—and still love—this logo. Maybe it&#x27;s because we have a gazillion startups and companies now, so every single logo looks the same to me. These old logos have spirit and personality.

A video of Steve Jobs (and his staff) seeing what he paid $100,000 for.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.logodesignlove.com&#x2F;next-logo-paul-rand" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.logodesignlove.com&#x2F;next-logo-paul-rand</a>

I found this article, written by an assistant to the guy who made the NeXT logo, enormously interesting: The Daily Heller: The Assistant, Jayme Odgers, Works for Paul Rand<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.printmag.com&#x2F;daily-heller&#x2F;the-daily-heller-the-assistant-jayme-odgers-works-for-paul-rand&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.printmag.com&#x2F;daily-heller&#x2F;the-daily-heller-the-a...</a>

The logo presentation booklet&#x27;s cover - with just the letters N E X T in white scattered across a black page - is simply beautiful to me. I can&#x27;t put into words what about it appeals to me. I can only imagine the effort put into that cover was far greater than it may appear.

Today I am using Wmlive as my daily driver. A Debian based distro with WindowMaker (NeXTstep clone) as default window manager. Looks beautiful. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wmlive.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wmlive.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a>

The sad thing is, the logo was a tiny part of the experience, which these days folks only see the successors of iOS (and derived) devices, and Mac OS X (or whatever they&#x27;re calling it these days).<p>At least we&#x27;ve moved on from the early releases where the Carbon Finder.app was a significant impact on memory, and the Java calculator app took multiple bounces to load Java and run.<p>I just wish that Apple would do something more meaningful than Sidecar so as to provide a stylus experience for Mac OS.

I feel like the only one who hated the NeXT logo, the colors, and further the whole design aesthetic of the OS and the concept of the Dock.<p>I guess it&#x27;s better than its contemporary Windows 3 but Windows 95&#x27;s start menu and taskbar seem far superior to me and I still prefer them to today&#x27;s macOS Dock and top menu.

the NeXT logo is up there with other significant logos at the time, especially the SUN and SGI logos. my personal favorite of those is the SUN logo though. at least in print. the NeXT logo wins as a tactile 3D logo on a computer case, followed by the SGI logo which also looks better in 3D than in 2D. but in 2D the SUN logo wins with its clever reuse of the letters U and N as ∪∩ looking like the rotated letter S, creating a circular structure that just appeals to the geek in me

If NeXT were still around to day the logo would be changef to the word &quot;Next&quot; in black sans-serif, not stylized in any way.

You can’t help but thinking the design process was just a bunch of completely random sketches accompanied with a story.

In terms of those retro &quot;3D&quot; logos I always favored the ones from Sun, Silicon Graphics and Nintendo 64. The NEXT logo looked amateurish by comparison.

Something I learned: One of the last logos Paul Rand designed was the logo of Enron.<p>I really like his redesign of the Ford logotype; although Ford doesn’t seem to have used it.

It&#x27;s fun in the gallery to see how his process was a lot, lot, of curious exploration of visual ideas. At one point he was thinking of an IBM-like &quot;wordmark angled in a ellipse&quot; logo; at another point he was looking at a futuristic hyperitalicize wordmark with MASSIVE X. They would have felt like so many different things!

Literally got my Next Slab working over the weekend, seen presentation before and its put a good smile on my face today.

I find the sketches reminiscent of the LaTeX logo delightful.

Glad I bought a NeXT Cube. Still looks like a futuristic otherworldly monolith. That Ross Perot had something to do with its inception still blows my mind.

I find it interesting that the final logo choice is not like any of the sketches. You could imagine that someone came along and went &quot;no, not like any of that&quot; and came up with something different.<p>It&#x27;s also humorous to me that the designer was considering something that looks like an hour glass for the X. Imagine using a symbol for your powerful new computer that essentially means &quot;wait&quot;.

To me the logo they ended up using isn&#x27;t as good as most of the other candidates.

Good read, but the many OCR issues were very distracting at times.

a true icon for generations to come :) sadly the ip is hiding in some shelf, this stuff must be used!

When I read the jobs biography I had to put down the book and look up the next logo after how important that logo and design process seemed to have been.<p>I was quite disappointed and find it hard to say anything kind about it.<p>It works a lot better on Steve’s t-shirt where you can’t see the box.

I miss my NeXTs so much. I really need to get another one.<p>Love the UX&#x2F;UI design and styling. The cases. The logo. Everything.

NeXT and Apple are stories of a founder bulldozing ahead with a vision, his coming and going coinciding with the respective companies’ high and low tides. The discussions around a “thing” are framed in the context of the of the thing, the founder, and one or more people who happen to be involved (the storyteller, scribe). No thing is ever discussed in isolation without the founder, and it’s always the scribe who tells that story. You will hardly ever come across a pivotal story about NeXT or Apple without the founder being mentioned as a key figure in that story, to the point that it’s their decision as to how that story ends.<p>The point? The thing is meaningless. It’s the story of the founder’s reaction and the cause and effect of the founder’s choices. The thing has no gravity in and of itself. It’s meaning entirely created and destroyed by the founder.<p>In the case of NeXT, it is literally the company rising and falling with the presence of the founder. The weight of any thing immediately diminished with founder’s departure. Nothing remained.<p>We shall see what happens with Apple. It may attain a new founder, or it may not.