A New Look For Second Life

[BelindaN]

I just don't care. It's just a logo. Ok, blue isn't my colour. I would prefer green, or pretty much anything over blue, apart from grey.

To me, I see a hand more than an eye. Just another day in SL.

Has there ever been a thread which hasn't gone down the pan into mud slinging? I cant think of one.

[Garnet Psaltery]

I made one!  It's great!  It has dynamic blue and an exciting splat that doesn't mean anything, so people won't be offended or speculate about it, and bright yellow letters to show it's optimistic! 

I had to miss out the last letter as I didn't budget for a logo this wide.  Do you think they'll hire me? 

[LibGwen]

My two cents:

In the banner at the top of the forum and blog pages, I noticed it at once.  "Ow, my eyes!"  (Intense shades of blue hurt my eyes.)  "How many fingers was that?"  (For some reason I think it has too many fingers.)  And "It's noticeably non-human.  They've widened it."  (Before it was "an eye which is a hand".  Now it's "a wide hand with an eye in it.")

On the white page of the blog, I have no problem with the color and it doesn't seem like it has too many fingers.  Go figure.  Still looks like a gorilla handprint first and an eye second.

On the whole I'm skeptical there's a difference to most people.  They changed the color, the new hand is wider in ways big and small, and "SECOND" is bigger.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

I'll just leave this here.

[Ted McGregor]

1 hour ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

It has dynamic blue and an exciting splat that doesn't mean anything, so people won't be offended or speculate about it..

Knowing SL, I betcha someone already is scripting  a product to shower that splat right off.

 

Agreed, pure speculation from my end, but still ..

Edited May 23, 2020 by TDD123

[811Lord]

5 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

I'll just leave this here.

 

[Conifer Dada]

I'm OK with the new logo. The old one was fine but the new one is bolder and neater.

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The green or almost an olive seemed to me to harken to elven lands, woodland creatures, fairies, woods, the Old World and so on. 

So by moving to the electronic or cybertronic blue, the Lindens are moving away from "world" and more toward "platform," which has always been a struggle for them, and for some residents.

This is a great description of how the two colors feel to me. 

[Drayke Newall]

2 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

I'll just leave this here.

Did someone with a time machine just spill the beans to which now has resulted in a time paradox thereby resulting in a altered future!?

Where have you heard Blender will be taking over Second Life in 2071?

[Asadora Summers]

The new logo reminds me of a Windows Store app. I prefer the old one. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Unnecessary Logo change is unnecessary 

[Prokofy Neva]

8 hours ago, Benjamin Brougham said:

From another designers perspective, 

In terms of the logo itself it's fine, but it could have been better executed. I would have liked to see a logo that flowed more cohesively and perhaps even an updated version of the icon (retaining the concept, but reinventing it in a modern way.) As for the word mark, there isn't really anything special about it and while it is a lot cleaner and more legible I don't know if it truly screams "Second Life" to me. I do personally prefer the change from green to blue, yet the reasoning seemed a bit forced. Overall the logo isn't anything special, and that is fine.

In terms of the announcement and overall rollout thus far, I feel as though it could have been done through a proper press release followed by a unified update to the websites and social media platforms... I do understand that they have different teams managing different aspects of the brand but I believe it could have been introduced in a more formal way rather then just saying "hey guys heres our new logo!" it just seemed a bit unprofessional in the grand scheme of things. 

At the end of the day, it was time for a rehash on the brand and I'm looking forward to seeing how they implement it across the platform.

One thing I was looking for was a reflection in the logo of the accentuation in the phrase, which differs among different people.

Possibly this might reflect regional linguistic differences or dialects.

But I think it reflects perception.

I've always said Second LIFE, with the accent on the second word in the phrase. It just seemed how it was "supposed to be". Other people I would run into at RL meet-ups also pronounced it this way.

But I discovered that Philip Rosedale and other Lindens said SECOND Life. To make it clear that it's second, but not life, not the main thing.

To test this, we'd have to discover what people say in general in California, and on other phrases like "second mortgage" or "second chance".

But I this might reflect the difference between the worldists and the platformistas. 

I see in the logo, the word "Life" is still more bold. There's hope.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

7 hours ago, TheDamed Spore said:

Prokofy Neva, thank you i actually did not know about the Hand of Fatima, and that greatly helps me understand the meaning behind the present logo.
With that in mind however its very obscure, and brings me back to the thought that it needs to be better executed, as another member of this thread Ben brougham also said.
or though the contention has been raised by Gatogateau that a complete over haul would be too drastic. i think in light of the political tensions specifically where second life is moving to a secure banking platform (tilla) due to worry about terrorism using their platform as a money laundering scheme the logo is in more desperate need of an over haul then it ever has been.

Likely more cultures outside the US understand the Hand of Fatima as a symbol. But yes, it's obscure relatively speaking, and their further gloss about "eye-see-hand-do" goes beyond the hamsa.

I don't think it's so much about terrorism, although that's possible -- you have to remember that to move any significant amount of money such as a terrorist or for that matter any large-scale criminal would require -- SL would be a very frustrating device, with all its fees and delays. And large amounts would stick out, and can be stopped simply for being very large.

It's more about gambling, I think, and the intention to stay in compliance regarding US laws against online gambling so that the credit card companies don't stop servicing SL. Without the credit card companies' participation, SL would be dead like any online business.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

7 hours ago, animats said:

I can see the rationale for "Solutions Providers". Some company comes to LL and says "I want to buy some virtual space for my employees working from home". LL has a sales team for that, and there's even an in-world sales center where they once had offices. OK. So they buy a region or two. Now they need to set it up. LL doesn't offer that as a service. There's no obvious way to get such a service. Marketplace doesn't help; that's all goods. So LL needs some place to aim business customers. Somebody who can set up "office park, one each"  in a hurry. Someone they can call if something breaks.

That's neither good nor bad; it's just setting up a business-to-business service, something LL hasn't needed in years.

No. That's not true. One thing for which God, the Creator, is famous, is not intervening in His creation -- or at least very rarely (in the form of miracles). Some people think free will and such are a good thing and others wish the Lord would intervene more often at their behest in particular to fix things not just like children going hungry or people being bombed in Syria but to make their car dealership in Kenosha successful.

The Lindens do not trust the very market they created and the very world they created. Had they not intervened to privilege (and save) their special pals, businesses would open up search, or open up classifieds, or put an ad on Monster.com or Craigs' List and they would have got answers. It's not like there aren't programmers and graphic designers without work all over the place and at this point there are zillions of competent and creative people who have been through SL and had successful businesses and/or beautiful sims.

You can go on the Marketplace and find office parks, business machinery replicas, and even giant Soviet stadiums, no doubt, like the ones the Moles found or made and plunked down for a very big client recently until finally the new hire (an old SL hand) put up some nicer, more user-friendly buildings from the actual market.

I will never forget once standing in the hallways at a big virtual worlds conference in NYC some 14-15 years ago. One of these superfluous men who populate giant IT businesses came up to Philip Rosedale himself, whom he had been trying to catch, and said, "Let me have my compliance department call your compliance department" or something of the sort.

Philip said innocently, "We don't have a compliance department". That is, sometimes belatedly and sometimes not at all, LL in the early days did comply with regulations, sometimes when the credit card companies stood on them and threatened them with cutting off service as I know from talking to some senior Lindens themselves in those days. But "compliance" was something the lawyer or the business manager did because it was a small, boutique lab, not a giant IT company. It was utterly unprepared in size and scope and experience and culture to deal with these giant entities that weren't even as giant as they are today. 

The way that giant companies dealt with new media is to have their PR people handle them first and advise them. They don't even call them "PR" anymore, but such companies have a variety of other buzz words they are known by, and they use terms like "engagement".

So first companies like Crayon came in and studied it and tried some test hipster campaigns and then they sold the big behemoths this odd and clunky virtual world which really had no immediate application or use for them --  because they were terrified of missing out on the latest cool thing the way they missed out on personal computers or social media. The PR firms then had to justify the huge amount of money spent on themselves so it had a run for awhile.

IBM, for example, started with 10 islands and I think they had double or triple that at one point but then they withdrew, not before having some of their avatars leave a larger-than-life footprint on the world's society and culture not to mention market. 

In the interviews of that era, including of me, you see this concern about the outsized effect large corporations will have on this fledgling world, like when they put the Interstate through or Amazon moves to town. But my point about it then as now wasn't that there would be "commercialism" or "capitalism" which I don't oppose like the forums' regs and the internal elite who are anti-capitalist in ideology.

What I was concerned about was the effect the giant corporations and monopolists would have on small and medium business and whether they would displace or cripple or kill it so that the society wouldn't be liberal and democratic, to the extent that can be said, but oligarchic and more authoritarian. 

I personally don't think that SL grows because IBM's marketing people put a graphics artist employee into the view with the help of SL's lapdog press, so to speak. I think it grows because of the opportunities for indigenous artists. Of course, it's not like the boundaries between these two groups are so defined. Some people who were "SL-famous" had jobs in the big corporations all along, or they were kids and then got jobs in Big IT. I always think of that particular griefer who led the Copybot revolution who later landed a programmers' position at Intel, and this may not be the accident one imagines, comrades.

 

 

Edited May 23, 2020 by Prokofy Neva

[LittleMe Jewell]

8 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

9 hours ago, TheDamed Spore said:

why is this community so horrible to each other?

we aren't, it's in the old source code of SL, and nobody can find a way to overwrite it.

For some reason that truly got me this morning.  Damn near had coffee all over the keyboard and monitors.

Thank you --- I needed that hard chuckle after reading the previous few pages.

 

[kiramanell]

46 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

No. That's not true. One thing for which God, the Creator, is famous, is not intervening in His creation -- or at least very rarely (in the form of miracles). Some people think free will and such are a good thing and others wish the Lord would intervene more often at their behest in particular to fix things not just like children going hungry or people being bombed in Syria but to make their car dealership in Kenosha successful.

 

I don't mind it in one particular thread, specifically designed for religious talk, but I was hoping we could leave religion out of this one; particularly when religion + political agenda are getting mixed. That rarely, if ever, ends well.

[Anna Nova]

10 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

...

It's not a good time. It's worse than the time when they tried to do things like take "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and call it "KFC" in the theory that you wouldn't notice it's all fattening, fried, junk food.
...

 

KFC = Kissing fixes Coronavirus?

[Polenth Yue]

10 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Second Life logo is of course a variation on the Hamsa, or the Hand of Fatima, which is an Islamic symbol, or even a more ancient Egyptian symbol which you can read about.

That symbol looks to me like a hand with an eye embedded in the palm... but the logo looks to me like a giant eye with fingers coming out the top like eyestalks. It's like the fingery version of a Beholder. So it doesn't really make me think of the older symbols, even if it might have been intended for that to happen.

[ItHadToComeToThis]

That is a horrific shade of blue. Everything about that new logo seems to just clash. Why didn’t they make it a community competition with the prize being a years worth of premium or linden equivalent for those that already have premium. 

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

1 minute ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

That is a horrific shade of blue. Everything about that new logo seems to just clash. Why didn’t they make it a community competition with the prize being a years worth of premium or linden equivalent for those that already have premium. 

That would have been fun! 

[Lindal Kidd]

11 hours ago, kiramanell said:

 

Not a trademark expert, but... we are almost guaranteed NOT allowed to use the old logo (in cases we couldn't before either). Just because they registered a new logo, doesn't mean they relinquished their rights on the old one. No sane company would, really.

Goodness.  I'd have thought the rhetorical nature of my question was obvious.  Didn't expect so many to take it seriously!

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

Just now, Lindal Kidd said:

Goodness.  I'd have thought the rhetorical nature of my question was obvious.  Didn't expect so many to take it seriously!

It sounded sincere, so we tried to help. Sorry.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

Although the new logo is nice, I always was parcel to the old one.  Then again I don't care for change that much.

[Coffee Pancake]

Wow ....

I wonder what took more effort, the new logo or the spectacular marketing waffle.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

17 hours ago, TheDamed Spore said:

Precisely the hand motif holds no meaning in its own right, and when you enhance something that has no meaning away from the visual relationship it has enjoyed with a product what you end up with is a meaningless branding. Imagine if you suddenly changed the coca cola logo to blue as opposed to red. The branding would loose its significance, and in that case would be at risk of being mistaken for another competitive brand Pepsi. Logos are very important in what you want to communicate to your audience. A bad logo can significantly damage a brand, a good logo can significantly bolster a brand. This change is perpetuating a bad logo that is now further distanced from the platform it represents.

But to be fair, the color red is a strong part of Coca Cola's branding. When I think "Coca Cola," I immediately see the distinct red. (Or black if you say CC Zero.) Similarly I can recognize those labels from any distance just based on the vague white-on-red or white-on-red-on-black colors.

When I think Second Life, I don't necessarily associate green with it -- at least not as strong as the other example. Similarly I would be much quicker to recognize the SL logo from the shape of it rather than color.

That said I preferred the soft color gradient rather than flat bright blue. I like minimalist design but I don't like it as a global trend.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator