Brand New

Ok, so as someone that walked this path and is currently on the other end as a freelance graphic and web designer, i'll put out a brain dump.

# Development

1. For web development, you'll find tons of best practices (i.e. alistapart, smashingmag, diveintohtml5, etc). This is the easy part, you can browse these or skim them whenever you get bored. HTML is pretty straightforward, but css is a bit trickier.

1.5. An too-long aside on css. CSS is one of the most important things to try to master as you actually start implementing design. CSS is pretty gross, it's alright and not that difficult, but it's gross and it's nearly always a mess. There are lots of frameworks around that try to remedy this, but i recommend that you actually try to figure much of it out before you start adopting frameworks. Similarly, before you use a css reset, you should actually try doing some work without them (the big problem is that each browser's default css is rendered inconsistently, so you make some assumption about webkit and find that opera and mozilla think you're a fool).

EXERCISE ZERO: try to see if you actually understand a) the box model and b) floats and c) positioning. These are the trickiest things. You can only really understand these if you try to figure out how you would use any of these things in practice. I put up a page with some stuff about those topics when i was teaching a web design class recently: http://risd.generic.cx/review.html

# Design

2. Learn typography. This is…

That's a problem that can be solved easily just by having a good and cheap city bike system. Oslo is also really hilly and the weather isn't the best, but since the city bike system was revamped in 2016 biking has exploded here.

https://oslobysykkel.no/en

One thing I really like about the Oslo system is how startup-like it is, unlike a lot of other systems which feel arcane.

The apps are flawless (there's no card), the design profile is fantastic [1], the bikes are good and light and they do a good job of communication [2].

[1] http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_and_identity_for_oslo_bysykkel_by_heydays.php

[2] https://www.facebook.com/bysykkeloslo/videos/1448346241855498/

Ikea didn't anger fans of Futura. It angered fans of typography.

Reasonable people could debate whether Futura looked dated and idiosyncratic. But almost nobody seems to have a defense for Verdana, which is a typeface that makes a number of concesssions for legibility at small sizes on a computer screen.

Worth reading though is Brand New blog's "Verdanagate" post:

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/verdanagate.php

Brand New certainly seems to think this is overblown. Gruber at Daring Fireball suggests that this is an elaborate ruse to get Ikea lots of attention and publicity from designers.

Congrats on the 1k subscribers! I personally would feel violated if i subbed to a newsletter and suddenly it was behind a paywall of $8 a month.

Brand New [0] did the same a while back, but for a much much lower price. And they offer their whole website with a massive history and daily updates for $2 a month or $20 a year.

I would personally try to find a sponsor instead of hiding your content that your 1k subscribers signed up for behind a paywall. A sponsor for a newsletter is IMHO a very normal thing.

[0] https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/subscribe

I should have provided some context since this isn't exactly the usual HN subject matter.

Earlier this week, Gap Clothing changed their logo from the old iconic blue box logo to the new one which is essentially another Helvetica wordmark and a box placed in the corner. Mike's post (the main link), which is employing quite a bit of insincerity, assumes you knew about this before hand.

Brand New, a great brand identity blog, has more and a lively discussion about it - http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/dont_mind_the_gap_or_the_square.php

This is mostly about the transition to SVG, not really a "brand evolution". The new logo is fine, not that much better or worse than any of the other variations shown. I don't get the hoopla.

I like what Wolff Olins did for Firefox OS and would love to see Mozilla take major new steps in that direction, with more radical changes to the logo (which frankly has always looked like a shrimp at favicon size): http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_to_mobile_oses_fox_you.php