How Famous OS Logos Got Started 103
Shane O'Neill writes "Ronald McDonald and the NBC Peacock may get more TV air time, but today's operating systems have cool logos, too. Google, Apple, Microsoft and the Linux crowd crafted mascots ranging from cute lizards to circles of life. In this slideshow, we look at the origins of the logos and look ahead to their future."
ugh (Score:1)
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One of these colors is not like the others. One of these colors just doesn't belong . . . .
Re:ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
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cmyk?
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Why not? The human eye has four colour receptors that may cross eachother a little, but is essentially: Red, Green, Blue and Rods (low light). Though the later is
mostly used when it is too dark to use the other three.
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who the fuck moded you insightful!
red, green, blue + red,blue,yellow = red,red,blue,blue,green,yellow
if you select only the distinct colors (as GP did), you get red,blue,green,yellow
if you count that list, you get FOUR colors
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A common slip. When you go to think of base colors like that, it's easy to thing RGB while actually trying to come up with RBY. I don't see why it's so far fetched that one might accidentally toss green in there, and that someone else might not catch it.
Now, as far as that being the reason they contrast well to the eye... I call bullshit. They are all as separated as they can be from each other on the spectrum, so naturally there is high contrast between them.
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I dunno what the technical reason is if any but afaict most people perceive yellow and green as distinct colors while cyan and magenta are percieved as variants of blue and red.
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I think that may be to the way we physically see the colors. Check out these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell [wikipedia.org]
Much of that information is over my head, but it gives me the impression that we are wired to see green separately, which may be related to yellow been considered subordinate.
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For me, green (#00FF00) and yellow (#FFFF00) look pretty much the same on CRT displays, while Magenta and Red do look different enough for a different name, I agree on Cyan and Blue tho
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Ditto. Who cares about anything that includes red and green, when you can't SEE red and green? Phhht. For the most part, I don't give a damn about colors. Give me a dark skin, with high contrast, and I'm happy!
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Green is NOT a primary color.
Red Hat logo (Score:1)
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I'd always thought the Red Hat was a reference to De Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" [wikipedia.org]. The IT industry also talks about "black hats" (hackers, appropriately enough the black thinking hat is "judgement"/"identifying flaws") and "white hats" (security folk, although the white thinking hat is actually "neutrality" rather than "vigilantism" or whatever, I assume it's intended as the polar opposite of a "black hat").
PS. Why is the idle section so screwed up? The comment box is narrower than it is tall (and it's only
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Red Hat and the logo were inspired by Mark Ewing's hat, as he was known to wear a red fedora around the Carnegie Mellon campus.
Source [wikipedia.org]
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I thought it was Carmen Sandiego's hat, because using that tricky hackery Linux stuff makes you a sneaky bugger!
Woefully incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
What about Amiga? Commodore? The Mac 'smile'? MS-DOS?
The article's pretty scant on details even for the logos they did describe. Commodore might not be around any more, but their logo remains iconic.
Re:Woefully incomplete (Score:4, Interesting)
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You would probably see a similar evolution as you see in TV Network logos or logos of other brands. Following the Zeitgeist, they would adapt to what's "cool" or "hip" (or whatever other word is currently hip or cool to describe hip or cool...). In the 50s, they'd have been serious and business-y, in the 60s they would have been down to earth, in the 70s flashy, in the 80s neon-flashy, in the 90s they'd have started spinning and today they'd be "we're too cool for a logo, so we just got this piece of design
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Remember, this is the Internet Age, where incomplete, under-researched, poorly written, fluffy snippets of stuff everyone in the target audience already knows is passed off as news.
Modern America: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Entertainment.
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Yep, and they also miss out the BSD Daemon [wikipedia.org], and Hexley the Platypus [hexley.com] - which beat the corporate Windows and OS X logos any day. And lacking BSD, they miss the story of the two Texans reacting to the BSD daemon T-shirt [milk.com], one of the best stories in BSD history.
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Thanks! I had been looking for that story. Last time I saw it, it was reprinted in an Ericsson company-internal Unix course compendium, under the title "Devil worshipping in Texas". There, it was illustrated with a three-year-old girl wearing a BSD tshirt and looking mischievous ...
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I first read it in 'Getting Started with FreeBSD' - a shortened, printed version of the FreeBSD handbook, if I recall correctly. I had to go to a local free software distributor to buy the CD-ROMs and a printed manual. I'm guessing this was 1997 or 98, and I desperately wanted an operating system that wasn't Windows 95. I've still got the disk package floating around somewhere - version 2.2.6.
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If we're talking about logotypes in general, there's actually quite a lot of interesting reading:
Coke vs. Pepsi branding [underconsideration.com]
Paul Rand's staggeringly impressive portfolio [areaofdesign.com] (More here [paul-rand.com]) -- IBM, NeXT, OS/2, ABC, Enron, Westinghouse, and UPS logos were all designed by Rand.
Rand also proposed (a fairly swanky) new logo for Ford in the 60s, although the company continues [muscularmustangs.com] to use the same logo that it did in 1912.
Famous logo nicknames [identityworks.com]
Raymond Loewy designed [raymondloewy.com] quite a few iconic oil company logos (and the US mail!).
Best and [underconsideration.com]
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Ads, what ads [mozilla.org] ? Are you watching TV or something ?
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Adblock does nothing to stop someone from paginating their content and inserting ad pages. The content is still interrupted.
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If only Adblock had the features of EditCSS and Repaginate combined to present such pages as a single page without redundancy.
If I didn't have to run Firefox 2.0.0.20 on this wretchedly old Redhat 9 system (due to no libpangocairo and too old version of GTK+) I'd be using Stylish to activate style rules on paged sites to hide everything but the story and Repaginate to concatenate all the pages together.
Google's Chrome logo (Score:2)
Looking at the high-quality version of that logo, it hit me - it looks a lot like one of those old "Simon" electronic games from the 80s (70s?). I know the game had four colors, and the logo three; but the resemblance is uncanny (to my eyes anyway).
Okay, my comment is neither "news for nerds" nor "stuff that matters"; but then neither was the story. :-P
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It's chrome. I just keep picturing the bumper of a(n) $1960S_MUSCLE_CAR. Not swirly primary colors.
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TFA mentions Simon. So I think your mention should be modded redundant.
I'm confused ... (Score:5, Interesting)
All this time I thought these [blogspot.com] were the right logos.
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Depends on which version of primary colors you use. For computer displays, they are : red, green, and blue. For art (painting), they are : red, yellow, and blue. So you could say all are primary colors.
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Re:Well, I made it one slide (Score:5, Interesting)
Red, green and blue are the "additive" primary colours--the three primary components to making any colour with sources of light (computer displays and televisions generally emit light, hence the use of the RGB colour model for video media). You got that one right.
However two of the primary colours "for art" yo9u mentioned aren't technically correct (but they have an historical basis). The "subtractive" primary colours are magenta, yellow and cyan. This is where you get the "CMYK" cartriges for your printers. The K is for blacK (I guess it isn't called CMYB because blue already took the letter B...).
The additive and subtractive primary colours have complementary characteristics. If you combine the light from each of the additive primaries you get white. If you combine pigment of each of the subtractive primaries you get black. The subtractive and additive primaries are each exact complementary colours of each other (the complement of one primary is the combination of the other two primaries), hence:
Red -> complement is green plus blue = Cyan
Green -> complement is red plus blue = Magenta
Blue -> complement is red plus green = Yellow
That is how we get the acronyms for the primary colours: RGB is ordered by wavelength and CMY represents the complement of RGB.
Anyways, science hadn't established modern colour theory before much of the work done by renaissance painters was completed--colour theory of that time was based upon observation and aesthetics. They saw rainbows, came up with colour wheels, saw how their pigments blended and such and came up with their own set of primary colours. In this case they divided the colour wheel into FOUR parts and picked four primary colours such that each primary had another primary as a complement (it was all about subtractive colour theory too--they didn't know much about the additive primaries of light to have the six primaries we have now). Those colours are roughly RED, YELLOW, GREEN and BLUE (picked as they are the most prominent in rainbow spectrums observed in nature).
The colours of the Microsoft Windows logo are the four "renaissance painter's primaries". Each pair complements the other and are both bold and pleasing to the eye. The poster ianare is basically right, all four colours are pri,aries in one sense or another, though the details weren't quite complete.
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Ya muppet, the K is for Key, couldn't you have googled it first? ;0)
Brain vs. Retina (Score:2)
While the retina processes in terms of three colors, the brain actually processes in terms of four colors [wikipedia.org] (or six if you count black and white).
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Depends on which version of primary colors you use
I suppose they could be considered primary colors as far as the visible light spectrum goes:
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet
Obvious omission (Score:3, Insightful)
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Why not discuss the Apple apple logo and how it changed from Newton to rainbow colors to it's current stark white? IMO the most interesting logo story...
And why not the Chevy logo as well? This is an article about OS logos, not corporations' or car brands' logos.
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There is no connection between Apple the computer company and Apple the Beatles music company. Not on the name, not on the logo. These two companies even agreed on that at the end of a lengthy lawsuit in the '80s.
What about ... (Score:2)
... the Slashdot logo?
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
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I agree. The author says that the colors of the Chrome logo were inspired by the Windows logo. That's ridiculous -- the colors obviously came from the Google logo. Google uses those four colors in almost all its logos. Obviously the author did not actually do any research.
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And the writing is sloppy and and vapid and horrid. Normally, I'd suggest to the author, "Don't quit your day job." But in this case, I think it'd be more appropriate to say, "Please quit your day job."
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Greetings and Salutations...
Notice that this is a website focused at "C" level managers. Not that I am saying that being too accurate can cause their heads to hurt...but....
In any case, there are certain levels of management where one needs fluff to make them feel as if they understand what is going on, yet, not cause them enough confusion that a worried frown might sully their brow.
Regards
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You think the writing is bad? How about the annoying jump-to-the-bottom-of-the-page-after-a-few-seconds-for-no-fucking-reason effect?
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It's yet another of those stupid "slideshow" articles. That's enough to put anybody off.
...laura
All Seeing Chrome... (Score:2)
Inspirations aside, the Chrome ball is a powerful image on its own. It's no accident that it resembles an eyeball, signifying knowledge and insight.
It's funny, I look at it and see Hal 9000 and skynet bundled together in a deviously delightful, 'Simon Says' resemblance that slips it unwittingly past the fears and vigilance of even the most skeptic late 80's and early 90's children. Signifying knowledge and insight is a simply a crafty way of claiming it is 'All Seeing' without the growing number of web conspiracy theorists sinking their teeth into the new Illuminati search engine overlords. I, for one, feel resistance to welcome them, to don
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Dude... What drugs are you on? And where can I get some?
Prime Colors... (Score:2)
Why red, green, blue and yellow? They are all primary colors, and contrast well to the human eye
GREEN is NOT a primary color!!! This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Green is a secondary color along with purple and orange, it is made by combining yellow and blue.
I work in the TV industry and so many people believe green is a primary color because they see "RGB" monitors (ok that was a while ago), or the red green and blue connections on HD TVS, "they must all be primary colors". Argh!
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[...] as far as those TV's are concerned, using the __subtractive__additive method (light, not pigment), Red Green Blue ARE the primary colors[...]
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Red, green, and blue are the primary colors of light. They are the primary colors because they correspond to the three color receptors in our eyes.
Cyan, magenta, and yellow are the primary colors of ink. They are the *opposites* of red, green, and blue, respectively. Ink works subtractively -- you start from white and remove color -- while light works additively -- you start from black and add. This is why their primary colors are opposites.
The primary colors of ink are often simplified to blue, red, an
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They are the primary colors because they correspond to the three color receptors in our eyes.
Other way around.
Our eyes have red, green, and blue receptors because those are the primary colours [of light].
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That is absurd. We evolved those three specific colors color receptors because they worked reasonably well for distinguishing objects. We could also just as easily have evolved violet, cyan, and orange color receptors.
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Ink works subtractively -- you start from white and remove color -- while light works additively -- you start from black and add.
I've never understood why that is. I know red paint reflects red light and green paint reflects green light. I know this because you can paint a black surface and it no longer looks black, so paint doesn't act purely like a filter. It definitely reflects light.
If I mix red and green paint, it seems to me that whenever light happens to hit a red paint molecule the red light component will be reflected and whenever it hits a green paint molecule the green light component will be reflected. If I mix the paints
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You are thinking about it the wrong way around. In the magenta pigment, you have particles that absorb yellow light. (All light not absorbed is reflected). In Cyan pigment you have particles that absorb red light. yellow pigment the blue light is absorbed.
You mix the blue and cyan pigments, and the red and blue light is absorbed, leaving only the green light to be reflected.
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Not any more you don't. Get out, you're fired. Take a look at the Vectorscope on your way out.
missing alot (Score:1)
SKYNET (Score:2)
I like how the Google chrome logo looks like one of those ominous all seeing eyes of a HAL or Skynet like computer. If any company has the potential to create a skynet, its Google. All hail CHROME!
*BSD (Score:2)
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I agree! In fact, the person who created the most famous version of the BSD Daemon logo was none other than Pixar's John Lasseter.
Windows Flag (Score:3, Funny)
News most misleading... (Score:1)
the chrome logo (Score:3)
I just wonder if the upcoming chrome OS is going to get he same scrutiny when it 'phones home' as other OS do.
crap article (Score:2)
the article contains almost no information on most of the icons featured, disappointed at the anti-apple remarks. Soooo much more could have been done with this subject.
So many pages! (Score:2)
LInux is not an operating system (Score:2)
And "Geeko" is a portmanteau, not a contraction.
Brown Ring of Quality (Score:2)
Obligatory Dilbert strip [dilbert.com] on the Lucent logo [wikipedia.org]
Ahh, CIO magazine (Score:1)
The magazine most likely to: Make me question my career choice.