Haven’t you heard? NBCUniversal has changed their mark! Wowee!
As for the wordmark itself, in a design sense, I don’t care much for it. It’s not particularly peppy, it’s not particularly expressive, but that’s ok. The purple on white isn’t exactly sober and doesn’t mix well with other colors, so I envision the ‘white-on-everything’ approach will suit them best. NBCUniversal has a lot of avenues to cover, so ‘flexible’ ‘sterile’ is a good approach. I can tell they wanted something more than Helvetica (although an alternate version of Copperplate is like taking crap and cutting away little pieces of crap in hopes it’ll become a diamond). I have to admit that on a gut level it’s much better than the Peacock/Globe mashup that preceeded it.
What bothers me, however, are a few interrelated things about the process that led to the unveiling of this thing. Most people automatically assumed that this would replace the famous NBC peacock on TV. After a bit of research you’ll realize that this is not the case, thank God, but people are indeed raising the non-existent issue, which underlines a big problem in perception that’s overshadowing any gain this change could have generated. Someone in the PR department screwed this one up.
On the other hand, if it’s just a logo for a huge conglomerate that the end-user never comes in contact with directly, why bother screaming it out to the world? I doubt Procter and Gamble would announce a new P&G logo with a big fanfare. I’d only care if they changed the logo for Duracell, Pringles, H&S, or whatever other brand is under their umbrella.
So really… my question is, why? People (and executives) tend to think that graphic design is some sort of quick-fix to the administrative and strategic problems that a company might have, when in fact it works in the opposite way. A project like this is supposed to *raise* questions in order to *create* answers and implement them on a visual and functional level.
If someone is sick, telling them to wear a suit probably won’t heal them.
If you’re not going to read anything else in this article, at least allow me to list some publicly traded companies that allegedly are worth less than Facebook (in descending order of valuation as of January 7th, 2011):
Nike
Target
Nokia
NewsCorp
Walgreens
Sony
eBay
FedEx
Dell
Starbucks
General Mills
I’m no investment strategist but, having $50B on hand, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night thinking that I passed on every single one of these companies and became owner of an ethereal narcissistic free-for-all (which is what Facebook really is, when you stop and think about it).
The apparent excuse going around is that the $50B figure comes from “future estimates”. Is it that much of a given that Facebook has enough growth prospects, let alone the profitability required to maintain the free services we can’t seem to live without? In the past few days, everyone has been jumping on the bandwagon and dissenting opinions on the matter are scarce (except for this article on The Economist). The parallels with the infamous dot-com bubble of the late 90s are worrying. Back then, opening a website equaled being profitable. Nobody cared about what business models were being deployed, and you’d be ridiculed as a small-minded loser if you passed on the action. Now, it seems that Facebook is enjoying the same dogmatic hype. Are we that out of touch with the recent past?
At the expense of sounding like a snob, I liked Facebook back when it wasn’t open to everyone. I was a Junior at UW-Madison in 2004 when it launched and I received an invitation shortly after. You could only sign up if you had a legit e-mail from an accredited University, and it made sense. It gave the service authenticity and it restricted your network to the local student body. You could advertise events, coordinate group and club activities, ask for help on homework, so on and so forth. You were almost 100% relevant to your audience, since you could at least assume that all recipients were people you saw regularly, in the real world. There was a practicality aspect to it. It had a point.
Slowly but surely however, the e-mail requirement loosened up to high school students, business professionals, and eventually this restriction disappeared entirely. The only security measure that kept Facebook’s userbase in check was gone, and almost simultaneously a lot of outside interests and pressures, along with the ever-present spam, showed up. The privacy issue is something I will avoid altogether (some people are such over-sharers that others are just waiting to capitalize on it). Nowadays, filtering relevant information on your News Feed is no menial task, and as the userbase has changed, so has the quality of its content. No, I don’t want to know what Smurf I resemble the most. No, I’m not interested in installing a daily Lolcat app on my sidebar. And most importantly, no I don’t care where you’re throwing your local knitting club party. It’s 2,000 miles away from where I live. Why are you in my friends list again?
The main issue for me (and the source of my skepticism) is that right now Facebook, unlike its aforementioned market cap buddies, has no marketable product for its users. None. Zero. Zilch. I can guarantee you that 99.9% of its users hasn’t put a penny into it since they opened an account (and I would be one of them). Even Flickr created revenue by introducing Pro subscriptions, while offering a service that compared to the ever-expanding list of Facebook quirks is a minuscule slice. Of course, Flickr has the advantage of being owned by Yahoo! and receiving money from its daddy. If Facebook wants to stay free, Zuckerberg and co. need to make up new ways to raise cash.
Herein lies the second problem. For the most part, Facebook power users are, you guessed it, teenagers. The kind that cannot open a bank account nor maintain a positive balance once they do. The kind that throw a fit when their WoW subscription is canceled by their parents, who, coincidentally, can’t even begin to understand why their kids spend so much time online. The kind that buys on a whim and forgets about it a second later. With that state of mind, can you imagine what’s going to happen once the time spent on Facebook will need to become money spent on Facebook? Any financially sound parent will take the opportunity to finally teach their kids about the difference between an investment and a money sink.
I can already hear you object that Facebook makes most of its money by selling ad space. Very well. How many of you clicked on an ad in the last year? How many of you log on to keep up with your favorite brands instead of, say, your middle school buddies? How many sales are generated directly through Facebook promotion? Does a low involvement product like Wheat Thins really need a fan page to improve sales (by making worthless, hip-talk claims like ‘being uber-real’)? The only campaign I can give props to was BK’s Whopper Sacrifice, and that was back when fan pages didn’t exist yet (it also enjoyed a healthy slice of controversy and didn’t last long, but those guys at CP+B were onto something). One might be fooled into putting a business model like this next to TV or Radio, where ads are the only source of profits, but almost all of TV and Radio are owned by bigger companies that fund operations thanks to cash flow coming from somewhere else, or through donations. The day Facebook rolls out intrusive ads is the day it will start its inevitable decline into MyEmptySpace land. Bottom line, I have yet to hear about a successful Facebook ad campaign making the news. Most people use Facebook as a broadcasting platform for user-generated content, and if the basic service stays free there’s no way that it can adapt to generate revenue.
I doubt that the people at Goldman Sachs didn’t factor this commonsensical analysis into their investment, or at least I would like to think that people aren’t that stupid or reckless (although I never cease to be amazed). So, from a business standpoint there are two questions that bug me: why would someone who’s supposedly doing so well like Facebook need (or accept) outside capital, and why is Zuckerberg adamant on holding off the IPO? I’ve been wondering whether Mark is going to be able to keep up with pros like the ones at Goldman Sachs, especially given their dirty track record. Either way, the fog surrounding the details of how Facebook finances its operations is worrying. You don’t slowroll this kind of information when the whole world is aching to read up on it. If Zuckerberg’s real interest was ‘connect the world’ or whatever, he wouldn’t do it for cash. He’d take the Wikipedia model, keep the service ad-free and untouched by corporations, then come out every six months or so asking for donations just to break even.
Where I do see revenue coming in for Facebook is through data mining, which would make us, the users, the marketable product. Is it any wonder that only recently the Foursquare-esque Places functionality was added (not before Statuses were copied to work like Twitter)? Once Facebook has a database of what you think, where you’ve been, what you look like, what kind of pictures you share, your email, your birthday, your relationships, so on and so forth, it will be a piece of cake to sell that to those companies that have completely forgotten how real research and innovation work. At 50B for 500M+ active users, that values the information in each account at around $100, even less.
Well, screw it. I think my life is worth more than that and I won’t give them that kind of satisfaction.
After a pretty crappy 2009, I was expecting things to turn around for the better in 2010. Finding out that Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire would release new albums by the end of May was a great start. Today, I happened to glance at the artists that will be coming out to Barcelona for the yearly Primavera Sound. Among gems like Spoon, Atlas Sound, The XX, Pavement and Grizzly Bear, wanting to see this cool “psychedelic-surf” Brooklyn quartet called Real Estate sealed the deal for me. I’ve been listening to their debut album straight through so many times I’ve lost count.
It is my opinion that the true test of a must-have app is when you’ve just finished a fresh (re)install of your OS. The first few apps you find yourself downloading are the ones you need the most. Since I arrived in Chicago last week, I got back to my old PowerMac G5, and had to add a few of these programs. These are the 5 that I missed the most.
I’m going to exclude programs like Firefox, Skype and VLC from this list, because I’ll assume you haven’t been living under a rock in recent times. Also, these are programs I can envision anyone using, regardless of profession. They’re just nifty stuff.
5.TextMate
I have to admit that most times all I need is TextEdit, but that’s because most times I only have to type out plain text and little else. TextMate outclasses TextEdit when you want to type out (X)HTML, CSS, LaTeX, Ruby, Python, C++, Java–basically any type of hand-coding. The suite of programmable shortcuts takes the cake. God knows I’ve typed a little too many A HREF in my life, so now I just type ah and TAB, TextMate creates the link template, and I only have to fill in the link target. On top of that, it automatically color-codes and formats your text, either with one of the many default styles or with one of your own.
4.Little Snitch
Just the little menu bar display for incoming and outgoing net traffic is worth the download, but its real functionality is in monitoring all your outgoing traffic, warning you when some out of line communication is happening. By default a window will pop up every single time, but as you spend more and more time using it, you can set rules (such as authorizing all Firefox traffic forever, or blocking specific ports, or specific URLs) and Little Snitch will bother you only when something outside of those rules is happening.
3.Growl
A non-invasive, pop-up notification system for all your apps. You can download modules for specific programs as add-ons, so Growl can display all your incoming IMs, completed downloads, Last.fm submissions, price changes in the eBay auctions you’re watching, and a whole lot more. Pretty simple but very useful.
2.Adium
If you’re anything like me, you have multiple accounts for chatting and you have no intention of running multiple programs to control them all. Adium does that. Even the basic bundle of AIM, Yahoo, GTalk and MSN is enough to appreciate this little app, especially when you have multiple accounts on the same platform. On top of that, there’s a whole community that releases visual and functional add-ons on the daily (such as support for Skype, icon sets, sound sets, and themes), it is a breeze to use and automatically saves conversations to searchable logs, categorized by recipient. My favorite function, though, is formatting all incoming text. Some people can pick horrible typography for their IMs.
1.Quicksilver
The amount of stuff this little shell can do is mind-boggling. Just recently I’ve learned to Tweet with it, and it is by far the quickest way to do so. Customization is a big selling point, both visually and functionally. You can email, launch apps, control iTunes, run Terminal commands, search files at blazing fast speed. Make Ctrl+Space your new favorite shortcut today!
What about you? I’d like to hear what your top 5 must-have Mac apps are!
I just recently found out what it is that makes High School Art so recognizable (and damn boring). It goes beyond technique, subject matter or media.
It is so damn literal.
It leaves nothing to the imagination and that causes your brain to just absorb it at face value–there is nothing to ponder upon.
It’s a mistake we all make: trying too hard. It’s pretty easy to obsess over one single idea and take out all those secondary things that could add to (or even multiply) the success of a project.
Jordi Cano, my professor at Elisava, has always been a big advocate of “1+1=3”, the idea that when you put two things together, the result is always bigger than the straight sum.
So, let’s be more ambiguous everybody.
Let’s mix punk rock with homeless shelters.
