Graham Smith, of I'm Just Creative fame, has recreated the VW logo specification for a downloadable poster. It's boss.

Via

Last week, Starbucks unveiled a new logo. This move, as readers of BlogLESS are aware, is done at a brand's own peril. (Further case in point, GapGate.)

Nevertheless, as Olivier Blanchard notes, "Seemingly undaunted by the prospect of having its own logo redesign firebombed across the Twitternets by masses of disappointed customers and fans, Starbucks moved ahead to mark its 40th birthday with such an exercise..."

The result?

The reaction, predictably, has been almost uniformly negative (and occasionally funny).

Logos "Starbucksified", courtesy of The Brand Builder Blog

Starbucks had to anticipate a negative reaction. But did they make a mistake?

I myself am not so sure. The logo retains the iconic Starbucks mermaid, and so visual continuity with the previous logo. Starbucks is hardly in a position to lose brand recognition at this point. Certainly, the new logo doesn't "pop" off the cup as much as the old logo does, but logos aren't comic books.

This design seems to me to be more of a political move -- a landgrab -- than a visual one. The point of logos, or at least one of their major functions, is to communicate the idea of a brand to viewers as quickly and simply as possible. If Starbucks can do that with a green circle, that, to my mind, is a huge gain for the coffee giant in the cultural iconographic Zeitgeist.

Of course, we probably ought to mourn the loss of a culture where we didn't associate a green circle with the Starbucks brand, but that's hardly the kind of thing we ought to expect Starbucks to care about. It's worth visualizing the iconographic payoff that Starbucks is playing for with this redesign:

The Starbucks logo, unevolved (contrast: Google's logo)

For several years now, Nike has made use an image of a snake coiled around a soccer ball for their ongoing "Don't Tread On Me" campaign in support of United States men's soccer.

A representation of the rattlesnake is also contained on the inside of their uniforms to be used in in the 2010 World Cup.

Personally, I've always associated this image with the US Marines and Navy, and so have been little dubious about the messaging here. Particularly, I was worried that this image suggested that we understand ourselves not as participants in the world's game, but rather as a kind of isolated, standoffish gang apart from the community of world footballers. The logo, it struck me, was not in the spirit of world sport that is supposed to underwrite the World Cup.

Having said that, I have become ambivalent about this issue after doing a bit more reading about the original locus of this symbol, the the Gadsden flag. To wit:

The use of the timber rattlesnake as a symbol of the US can be traced back to colonial days, and specifically to the publications of Benjamin Franklin. In 1751, Ben suggested that America ought to thank the British for their policy of sending convicted criminals to America by sending rattlesnakes to England. The Gadsden flag -- which bears this symbol -- is considered "one of the first flags of the United States," later replaced by the current Stars and Stripes flag.

"Since the Revolution," Wikipedia claims, "the flag has seen times of reintroduction as a symbol of American patriotism, a symbol of disagreement with government, or a symbol of support for civil liberties." On this view of the symbol, I think it's great. It says something about our national history, and celebrating that is certainly in the spirit of the World Cup.

In the end, I leave it to you to decide for yourself. There's more detail about the history of this symbol here.

It was created for structural engineering firm Ryan-Biggs by Bryan Kahrs at id29. I always like these sort of visual puzzle logos. The letterforms are weirdly structural in a way that tickles my brain.

That is all. Go forth and weekend.

Round out a rather light week for me at BlogLESS, look at this clever and restrained logo for St. Francis Hospital, a small church hospice in Budapest, created by Hungarian designer Robin Kosnas.

The pigeon is the attribute of St. Francis and of course, open hands symbolize mercy.

I love this logo for Rehabilitation Hospitals of America. Playing on the well known hospital cross symbol, designer John Langdon created a witty and austere rendering of the company's tagline: "We rebuild lives, step by step by step."

Logo for Rehabilitation Hospitals of America by John Langdon (Via)

Another clever logo that deploys a positive/negative space ambiguity to good effect is this one, for the Food Writers, by 300million.

Logo for Food Writers by 300million (Via)

In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses.

Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14 criminals.) Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive.

– Maggie Wittlin, Seed Magazine

An attractive 'average' face generated by the Face Research Lab

Back in September, 2006, a paper published in the journal Psychological Science proposed a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process.

"The principle finding is that you like a pattern to the extent that you classify the pattern fast," the study's author and psychologist at the University of California, San Diego Piotr Winkielman said.

On the one hand, this is pretty old-hat to anybody in the design business, and particularly anyone in the interface design business (web or otherwise).

We all learned in UI 101 that (a) a good operative definition of "usability" is that a user doesn't have to think about how to do what she's going to do, (b) that one of the best ways we can accomplish this is give them interface elements that they've already learned how to use.

On the other hand, the Gestalt Laws of Prägnanz provide us with some formal figurations that explain why our brains like puzzles.

Just as doing a bit of physical exercise, mental exercise is not only helpful to us in the long run, but can provide an "adrenaline-rush".

A simple Gestalt 'Figure-Ground' puzzle

So, obviously our designs should be created to take advantage of our user's perceptual fluency both positively (providing familiar UI components) and negatively (using Gestalt and other techniques to provide users with the endorphin-rush of solving a simple visual puzzle).

The really interesting question is whether you can do both of these things at once in a way that preserves the value of each. Now that's a design problem.