Apple seems to be one of the most tightly managed brands in the world, but they actually use their logo much more whimsically than any other big brands. I’ve written in the past about logo usage that runs against typical brand management best practices. On the eve of their 50th anniversary, I’ve come across two more examples. I wanted to share them as a way to continue to document Apple’s approach to visual identity:
I have three kids — one in college, a senior in high school and a middle schooler. They’ve grown up in a school district where they’ve had their own Chromebooks for the majority of their education. They use Google Docs and Slides, plus a host of online tools like Canva. Chromebooks dominate the K-12 education market, but once they graduate, what do they use?
When my oldest went off to college, we purchased an M2 MacBook Air and that’s been the computer that she’s used for the last three years.
I plan on blogging about my dissertation process, and I figured I’d start with something basic — my choice of writing tools. I wanted to use some less traditional tools when writing my dissertation. When I’m writing for myself, I write in Markdown, usually in an app like Ulysses. I considered something more robust like Scrivener. But neither Ulysses nor Scrivener works easily with Zotero, my chosen citation management program which already contains years of sources and notes on my topic.
For 13 years, I managed the visual brand of the University of South Carolina. I led creative teams and worked with vendors and agencies. I produced banners, designed signage, wrapped buses, worked on TV commercials, and installed 6-foot high USC letters. And while I loved my time as the “Guardian of the USC Brand,”1 this summer, I started to think about making a career change. I’m getting close to finishing my Ph.
I recently created a couple of new fonts over on Fontstruct: SbB Crunch’d and SbB Papaya 26.
SbB Crunch’d SbB Crunch’d is a little random. Normally when I start working on a type design, I have an idea of how it will be used. In this case, I started with the shape of the “scalloped edges” and built out the font from there. I like how it turned out, even if I have no idea how I’d use it in a layout.
Different social media platforms varied in how they handled the inclusion of multiple inline links in a recent post, with Bluesky successfully displaying both links while Threads and Mastodon only showcased the first one.
I enjoyed this article in the NY Times about the sadness that you feel when your favorite restaurant closes.
Every restaurant is a portal — a way to remember who you were and how things felt when you were, say, 19, or 27, or 35, but also to remember the particulars of a city, a neighborhood, a block.
I started to think about the restaurants that I’ve loved that are no longer open.
The warning signs were there. Ten years ago, I wrote my first Twitterless article, followed by part 2 in 2017, part 3 in 2022, a “final” chapter in 2023 and an epilogue in 2024.1 My initial concerns were about Twitter’s financial shape, but after Musk took over, I quickly realized the new service wasn’t going to be for me, closed my accounts, and moved on.
With the latest news about X, the service formerly known as Twitter, I don’t understand how anyone still has an account.
Each year, I set a theme for the year. Last year was incremental progress. I did write a lot during the year, and I released some new typefaces, but I wasn’t able to reach my health goals and organization is still something I want to continue to work on.
For this year, I’m excited about a fresh start. I start an exciting new job (that’s really a completely different career). I’ve finished all of my Ph.
One strange thing about Apple’s visual identity is that they allow logo variations that most brand managers would never approve. In the past, I’ve noted their environmental logo with a green leaf and their security logo that looks like a padlock. They have a gift logo that they use annually during the holidays and created a special logo for their opening of their Marina Sands store in Singapore.
Today, I saw another couple of variations to add to my list from the Apple Japan web site as part of their New Year’s Celebration:
I was thinking this morning about goals and themes for 2026, but as I thought through my plans, I realized that 2026 is going to be a big year for me and my family.
New job. I have a new job, and it’s a massive shift from what I’ve done for the last thirty years. I’m excited, but I have a lot to learn. Thankfully, I have a supportive team and I’m still at the university that I love.
I’m not the audience for Brian Recker’s Hell Bent. He’s writing for evangelicals (and former evangelicals) who are questioning their faith. I instead came to his book as a lifelong Lutheran who is baffled by how the Christianity that I grew up with has become warped by others who also profess to be Christian.
Brian’s thesis is that evangelical theology is so rooted in the fear of hell, that they struggle to see the message of love that is core to Jesus. I think it’s a pretty convincing argument. Brian breaks down all the ways that a fear of hell actually undermines having a relationship with God and sabotages healthy relationships with others. Faith rooted in fear leads to a very different place than faith rooted in love. I appreciated the exploration of evangelical theology, and all the personal examples of how Brian’s life changed when he started to question hell. It’s a very personal book. I learned a lot along the way, and was able to explore some of my own beliefs. I highly recommend that you check out Hell Bent.
When I became a designer 30 years ago, you needed three types of apps: a page layout app, a photo editing app and a vector app. You purchased those apps from whoever had the features you needed. Quark Xpress and Adobe Pagemaker1 were your options for page layout. Macromedia Freehand2 and Adobe Illustrator were your vector options. And while there were other photo apps, Adobe Photoshop was the dominant professional photo editor.
I typically watch one or two NFL games a week, and yet, I don’t really have an NFL team. (I’m currently watching the Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday Night Football as I write this.)
When I was little, I was a Cowboys fan. We’re taking about the Tom Landry, Danny White, Tony Dorsett era Cowboys. When Jerry Jones bought the team and got rid of all my favorite players and their legendary coach, I decided I was no longer a Cowboys fan.
We live in a world now where our media outlets are owned by a small number of conglomerates. And while this is possibly a more profitable set up for the corporations that own these outlets, it also makes it easy for them to be manipulated by billionaires and governments.
Our distribution channels are corrupted as well. Social media and newsletter platforms are controlled by a small number of players all motivated by advertising profits.
My Ph.D. research is focused on consumer response to logos and visual identity, so as you can imagine, I’ve talked about Cracker Barrel1 a lot over the last few weeks. Everyone has an opinion and is eager to share it. I held off writing this because the social media chatter was just chaotic, but now that things have calmed down, I wanted to share some quick thoughts based on my research.
A friend was digging through some college artifacts and found my 32-year-old business card from when I was an officer with Carolina Productions, the University of South Carolina student programming board. She sent me a picture and I noticed something funny: I still have the same email address.
I came to USC as a student in 1993 and got my first email address. I used that email address with a command line system until I graduated in 1997.
When Liz asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate my 50th birthday, I told her that I wanted to go to a Cubs game in Wrigley. I hadn’t been to Wrigley since 1988 when we moved back to South Carolina. Liz and I decided to make it happen, albeit a week before my birthday. Instead of dropping one image at a time, I figured I’d take more of a photo essay approach.
Experimenting with new features in Fontstruct, Photoshop, and Glyphs has inspired the creation of two new font designs, SbB Vertica and SbB Roundabout.
Every so often, Fontstruct has a themed competition and the current competition focuses on the new color features. I’ve pulled together three color designs that try to use color in different ways — a pattern, a bright multicolor whimsical design and a 3D effect.
One of the fun things about the competitions is the amazing creativity that comes out of the community. Fonstructors can interpret the theme is very different ways and it’s always amazing to see the varied approaches driven by a simple prompt.
I’ve been thinking about color fonts lately. Experimenting with the color fonts features in Fontstruct and Glyphs. Trying to better understand how to create color fonts. And while I’m starting to understand how they are made, I’m left with one major question… why?
Why do we need color fonts?
If you don’t know, fonts are typically monochromatic. Black and white only. Color is applied in software like Adobe Illustrator or Microsoft Office.
