The University of California has a new logo. It’s supposed to be better for online icons (especially small ones).
The problem is, it sucks. I mean, it’s really bad. NPR did a story. Even the stylish Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsome, thinks it’s bad. HuffPo has a good article and a slide show that depicts some of the fun people have been having with this abomination of a logo.
At first I said: “The new University of California logo is a sad corporate healthcare logo whose yellow toner cartridge ran out. http://bit.ly/RKIVcn #UC”
So as a proud alum (UCLA MA 2007; PhD 2008), I first thought I’d express my displeasure with a simple meme. (I even used Comic Sans to highlight how unprofessional and unscholarly it looks:
But I think I’ve got a better analogy, one that captures the essence of the logo as some form of bad personal hygiene logo:
The new UC logo is awful. It looks more like a condom logo than the icon of a prestigious university. Mashup by Dr. Robert Cargill.
For those that remember the UC Davis pepper spray incident, I thought this was clever:
UC Davis Pepper Spray logo
Enough said. It’s bad. Logo FAIL! Or to put it in academic terms, rewrite and resubmit.
Filed under: humor, things that suck | Tagged: awful, condom, design, fail, Gavin Newsome, huffington post, huffpo, logo, npr, safe sex, sucks, uc |
XKV8R: The (Retired) Blog of Robert R. Cargill, Ph.D. 
A UCLA alum, too … and I hate it.
Is THIS what all that extra money being paid to the already overpaid paper-shuffling, clock-watching, party-giving, do-nothing administrators bought ?
[…] had previously panned it here, saying it looked like a bad condom […]
The reaction to this is just plain stupid. This is what happens when the public is misinformed and allowed to run rampant through the streets. The new logo is NOT replacing the old one! The old one would still stay around. What the new design was doing was creating a beautiful, clean and creative logo that unified the whole “University of California”, adding a logo where there used to be none.
What the public doesn’t understand is that there WAS NO LOGO. There was just a seal, and that seal isn’t going anywhere.
Well, I heard all of what you are saying on NPR, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was awful.
It was not beautiful. It was not clean (was that a gradient on the ‘c’?). And it was not creative.
The public may not have understood that it WAS NO LOGO (and whose fault is that?), but the public DID understand that it was AWFUL.
And best yet, it was soo bad, the UC killed it. So it’s gone now…
bc