Wasn't expecting tears over a colour
I've always loved the existence of "rebeccapurple", but I somehow missed that part of the story. Her color being immortalized in the CSS logo (even if it changes years from now) is so incredibly beautiful to me.
I have really strong memories of learning HTML, CSS, and javascript in high school, and spending time in the school library picking apart css/edge. It felt like the dawn of a new era, I was in awe of the things I saw there. I built more than a few sites trying to get my head around the complexispiral demo, and spent countless hours diving into resources I found there (like A List Apart! I will never forget the suckerfish drop-downs). This is one of the few moments I have such vivid memories of that were directly responsible me for pursuing computer engineering and ultimately going so far into UI/UX and the web. I've never written it out this explicitly but: thank you for everything, Eric.
The pain feels too strong to handle some days. I find myself in tears after some seemingly random trigger: seeing another baby in a stroller, listening to a beautiful track named "Never Known", our first daughter saying she wants to play with her friend's small sister, seeing a painting she made with her to-be sister, writing this comment etc.
I have accepted that the pain will always be there.
Thanks for sharing your story.
P.S. there are subreddits where people share similar stories
A few days ago I completely broke down hearing “Daughter” by Four Tet. The triggers that don’t even make sense are the hardest. It’s really tough to hear other people having felt similar pain (nobody should have to endure it), but it’s comforting to not feel completely alone in it. Wishing the best for you and your family.
I can’t imagine anything worse than what that guy has been through.
I’m holding my sleeping baby as I write this and I just hugged him even tighter. Thanks for sharing.
I found this piece particularly moving, and brought me to tears:
https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/10/so-many-nevers...
I really hope that man can find peace.
"Suppose that the children have grown into youth And have turned out good, still, if God so wills it, Death will away with your children's bodies, And carry them off into Hades. What is our profit, then, that for the sake of Children the gods should pile up on mortals After all else This most terrible grief of all?"
I try not to think about it too much.
(Personal opinion: fairness is a human construct. The universe does not care. We are the ones who make it as fair as we can.)
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald - Apr 10, 2019
Whether that applies here is naturally subjective, but hearing that changed how I look at logo designs a bit.
A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.
That said:
> A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.
Weren't the logos in TFA made and voted on by programmers?
And they’re not even consistent. Three of them are squares, two of them are different shapes, and despite the simplicity even something as trivial as the font size and spacing isn’t uniform.
As I think you already know, the designer obviously wasn't suggesting that. He was saying that clarity matters, not that only clarity matters.
We didn't get that it was supposed to be a logo or a brand though.
Labels like this look like placeholders. They leave you feeling empty and convey a sense of amateurishness.
These do provoke a visceral response. It's not an "Oh!", nor even an "oh?", but rather an "oh..."
The "brand guidelines" will be broadly disrespected since the mental threshold for brand awareness is higher than the entropy of a square.
CSS is not a technology that needs eye-catching marketing. The existence of branding is mostly just for the purposes of giving someone something to put on a powerpoint slide, or a sticker to put on a laptop. It's allowed to be boring.
In addition, it exists as part of a family of web technologies, so giving it consistent branding with the other web technologies makes sense. You can argue that whoever first came up with this simple sort of branding was unimaginative (I think the JS logo was the first?), but just because something is simple doesn't mean it's not capable of being iconic.
It appears this option was discussed: https://github.com/CSS-Next/css-next/issues/105#issuecomment...
They use the words vote and community, but actually taking them seriously means accepting the Boaty McBooatface when it happens.
I liked the offset logos because they served just as well as logos and were a good humoured nod towards CSS issues that it would be worthwhile keeping in mind for a bit of humility.
An entire generation of web designers grew up with their heads stuck in the Adobe ecosystem, so this must look like the gold standard to them.
At least Adobe made an effort to make their logos look like symbols on the periodic table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#/media/File:HTML5_logo_a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CSS3_logo_and_wordmark.sv...
Also people actually use them, a while back every CS student inexplicably had these stickers on their laptop. I can't see these new logos being ever used as stickers because they're just... nothing.
Don't let the warts of the real implementation get you down, it's a delight how everything I want to do is just part of the vanilla stack now, one way or another.
Which visual impairment exactly will find it easier to parse the previous logos (which are a mess of design scarcely related to the actual technology name) than the current ones, which contain thick bold text indicating exactly what the technology is called?
> Do not rely on color alone to denote information
> Use additional cues or information to convey content
The old icons were certainly ugly. But they had a unique shape (cue) and didn't rely on color. The new logo has text which helps, but this is where visual impairment becomes an issue (lack of focus to read said text).
I have no intent to take away from the meaningful choices made in this logo's design. But even just picking a unique shape for each component would go a long way.
Comparison, in monochrome at small size: https://i.imgur.com/3UvKKtg.png
Logos are sometimes printed on shirts (in monochrome, or where rich coloring costs extra), or embroidered onto hats, or read at a distance (like conference booth posters), or printed to B/W official letterhead, or scaled down for an icon pack. A 3rd party will include a logo on something with a preexisting style, and it should look okay there.
A logo which is structurally simple and uses few colors can be easily adapted to these scenarios — printed in black-and-white, or as an outline without solid colors.
The text in in random sizes and different fonts for no reason. The shapes are not all the same or all different; they are just randomly different.
It's not that any one logo looks bad; they look awful because they are _incoherent_.
The most important part about convoying that an item is CSS is including the letters CSS. So while I am a little disgusted they wasted time on an icon at all, I will admit that many of our design language structures demand an icon. So I am somewhat relieved they managed to dodge the design for design's sake crowd and picked the best possible one. A non-descript box with the letters CSS in it.
Perhaps those brutalist logos were designed specifically such that they could be rendered using CSS itself? Though I could understand why they'd want to distance themselves from the old "shield" logo that turned out to signify shielding "browser vendors" from broad implementation of CSS renderers and to keep a niche of job security at W3C, Inc. due to rampant and unwarranted complexity, but in any case was burnt by being placed next to vulgar metalhand vectors, not to speak of being culturally discriminative when viewed in a "woke" interpretation.
[1]: https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.13378023.4114/raf,750x1000,0...
Is this a joke? I’ve never seen it in my life, not even sure where you’re pulling it from
Or clones of Adobe’s lame branding.
Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34186932 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565503 - May 2015 (33 comments)
Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924677 - June 2014 (25 comments)
In memory of Rebecca Alison Meyer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863890 - June 2014 (68 comments)
And furthermore, I am a passionate logo designer and logo design critique.
Did you really forgot why its called rebeccapurple?
GNU Terry Pratchett
Probably the place where it’ll be seen the most is in IDE file trees, where I’m a bit worried it’ll just look like a little purple blob
VS Code shows "JS" in yellow text without the box, against a dark background. CSS is just a blue hash symbol. Maybe they'll change the color to rebeccapurple, but I don't think there's room for a box around the symbol.
I really think it's fine: the web assembly gets to play with its parallels between W and A, JS gets to mirror the J's bottom-bend in its S (TS tagging along because those two really are more than just accidental neighbors), whereas CSS can indulge in summetry with its twin S by making them internally symmetric themselves. A logo that contains an acronym isn't really a logo when the characters are just picked from some font instead of tailored as part of the logo.
Consistency still matters. If you’re going through the trouble of making logos similar so they are understood as part of a family, don’t give up half way.
Mr. Meyer certainly had a rough 2014.
Kudos to him and all his CSS contributions over the years. I hope he has been able to find some solace since then.
And I can't blame him. They say no parent should see their child die, and that's certainly true; but especially no parent should see their 6 year old child die of brain cancer. Humans are not built to withstand that.
What's that supposed to mean? Humans grew up being slaughtered by wild animals. Safe housing is an extremely recent invention and many humans still don't have it.
As for your imaginary hunter gatherer:
1) Yes I'm sure when a child died in agony over a prolonged period of time in hunter gatherer societies, their family was also traumatised.
2) The modern nuclear family has changed our sense of emotional attachment to our children. Whether that's good or bad is a separate discussion, but our relationship with our children is different to what it was 500 years ago, let alone 5,000 years ago.
It's nowhere near the significance of her's and Eric's story, but the piece of land where my grandfather built his home in the 1940s or 1950s has his name on it: the "Paul D. Cravens Addition". Even though that home is long since gone (in a fire) and the land is owned by someone else, every deed and building permit henceforth has his name attached it.
(Not doubting your anecdote - Just felt like doing some sleuthing on the timeline)
[0] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Jun/0312.... [1] https://caniuse.com/css-rebeccapurple (use "Date Relative")
But after looking at it, I realized that it was just for CSS 3 and I'm not sure if it was even official?
and yet it's 5 logos with 3 different font sizes and at least 3 different font faces
3 of which are perfect rectangles, and 2 of which are slight variations on rectangles
i guess it perfectly represents the ecosystem, no notes
R = 1/5
G = 2/5
B = 3/5
Edit: of course that makes sense it is probably a "web safe" one
[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/di...
[2]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Mar/0272....
Haha
Was I the only one going in thinking that this would result in a slightly off-green colour (RGB(14, 202, 0)) instead?
https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1851735303.3881/flat,750x,07...
Think of Apple or Nike, those are real logos. The recent logos and icons, including apps like Photoshop's, seem more like we're prioritizing metrics over creativity.
But there are reasons for this. Plain wordmarks are high-contrast and easy to read almost by default, and they work great with groups that aren't already aware of your brand. Or as Netflix puts it (https://brand.netflix.com/en/assets/logos/),
> The Wordmark remains an essential identifier of our brand. While our goal is to lead with the N Symbol, we enlist the Wordmark to ensure brand recognition in low-awareness markets or when production limits the use of color.
CSS doesn't have a ton of brand awareness. Making something akin to the Nike Swoosh for CSS won't catch on, it's not like they have the money to flood your Instagram feed with it and force that brand recognition on you.
Going back to Netflix why would they use a single gently stylized letter where possible? Well,
> In high-awareness markets, we lead with the N Symbol. There is power in owning a letter of the alphabet: it’s universal and instantly identifiable as shorthand for our brand.
That's right. Netflix wants to own the letter N. I think "CSS" is in the same position: owning a combination of three letters is a power move. That's the most valuable thing about the "CSS brand," if ever there were one, so why not lead with it?
But maybe your opinion is still that all of these designers are full of it (apparently including Paul Rand).
- text, with a specific font, position, size, weight
- a specific color
- a box radius in 3 corners
- some variants
By your definition, the Coca Cola logo is not a logo because it’s "just text"
The web community is obsessed with this "neat, tidy" shit while the all the standards involved (HTML, JS, CSS etc) are a dog's breakfast.
At least for how my brain works, having a little picture to hang the information off of is easier than having to memorize a slew of TLAs and FLAs.
Maybe I should rough out some logos for these things for myself.
