Everything you ever wanted to know about the NeXT logo, and lots you didn't

[Rhetorica]

Background

The NeXT logo was designed by Paul Rand. As the story goes, Steve Jobs gave him $100,000 for the job, and Rand (who had designed logos for big brands like IBM and American Airlines) accepted what must have been a paltry sum to him, on the condition that (a) he delivered precisely one design and (b) no modifications would be requested. (The second part of this is provably false; see pl212's post below.) Steve agreed to the terms and Rand presented his final design in the Spring of 1986.

By this point, the Memphis Milano design group was arguably past its prime, having debuted their first show in 1981; Ettore Sottsass had left the group the prior year, sick of the thing he'd created, and by the time the NeXT Computer actually launched, they'd disbanded entirely. To the fashion world, the logo would have not looked like the cutting edge of the avant garde, but rather last season's novelty, already trickling down to second- and third-rate shops. In all likelihood Jobs didn't really embrace the design fully. His ideal version would perhaps have been more like a certain shirt:

^{A mono logo on black. Certainly in line with ditching the rainbow at Apple.}

It is also noteworthy that there is really only one other piece of official NeXT design that could be called Memphis-inspired: the ADB mouse, seen here with its deadbeat progeny:

...although arguably the green power/volume/brightness keys are also rather intrusively Memphis-inspired:

^{Where's my fucking Home key, Steve?!}

Rand's documentation; colors

Rand and Jobs are no longer with us, so we cannot truly ask what they thought, though the former wrote quite a lot about the design, as was his job. Rand's estate preserves a shrine to the logo on his website. This thread will not repeat what is already written there, except to note that we know that Rand went through many designs and ultimately presented the work in a booklet. Everything about the logo was meticulous and intentional, from the oversized lower-case "e" to the angle at which it should be rotated for correct display—28°.

It should also be understood that the image at the top of the page does not reflect the colors correctly; it is an heirloom illustration passed down through several converters. The correct CMYK values and Pantone names are noted on the 'Color reference' page, which is also optically inaccurate. The RGB version that appears in the Dock uses hues from a simplified 16-color palette to ensure correct presentation on low-end screens, and should not be understood as canonical, either.

^{Of course, with Photoshop, nothing is impossible.}

Artist intention

So, what else is there to say about the NeXT logo that isn't already on Paul Rand's page? More than you'd think.

The first thing to know is that the vector at the top is not the final version. Bending the rules slightly of Rand's edict on no modifications, the logo was revised with thicker lettering:

^{Left: as advertised. Right: corrected for small sizes.}

This was standard practice in the era of print: ink bleed in high-end publishing was always a concern, and savvy typographers had long been in the practice of exaggerating internal corners in typefaces to ensure that they'd stay crisp. The standard NeXT dock icon, regardless of OS version or color mode, is based on this thicker-letter variant. Even Steve's shirt appears to have the thicker lettering, and I don't think the original version (described in this post) was ever actually used by NeXT.

So: How exactly was the logo defined? If we want to create a copy of it from scratch which is perfectly faithful to Rand's vision, it doesn't help us just to measure the files we have; they're imprecise products of multiple format conversions and do not capture the true essence of what Rand actually intended. Even the final vector version on Rand's site has many defects: it is rotated 28.05° instead of 28°, the colors are way off due to multiple conversions between different programs, and the whole image is about 1% taller than it should be. Needless to say, the actual numbers in the file are extremely dubious!

After banging on the vector file as best I could, and controlling for as many parameters as possible, I fed a copy of this revision of the logo to Claude, which was able to produce a true compass-and-straightedge version of this iteration of the logo with precisely-defined numbers. It is as follows:

Download: EPS, SVG

Again, I need to repeat: This is not the final logo that NeXT actually used! For that, see this post further down the thread.

The salient definitions are as follows:

• The front of the square is defined as being 21 units long, with some overhangs being measured in 1/16th of a unit. (If we multiply these to get cleaner numbers, we get a front face that is 336 sub-units wide. The above image should have these dimensions, meaning the letter strokes are 16 px wide.)
• The bottom face of the cube is out of place. This appears to be deliberate. The gutters between the cube's faces are 5/8ths of a unit, aside from the bottom one, which is 11/16ths of a unit. This was probably done to make the logo look better when rotated by –28°. There is a 'bad' version of the NeXT logo circulating that ruins these gaps, likely due to a botched attempt to correct them; when shopping for NeXT paraphernalia online, do not be fooled!
• The X is noticeably wider than the N, and spills out into the gap between the letters. The e does, too—in fact, both letters have bigger bounding boxes than the T and N on all four sides, which keeps them looking balanced—but the most obvious compensation for alignment is how the X spills out on the right side.
• The bottom-right corner of the bar of the e is the rightmost extremum of the circle in which the e is inscribed—that is, if you cut off the bottom bar of the e, you'd have a perfect semicircle. I've never seen a version of the NeXT logo that screwed this up, but plenty of geometric fonts do it wrongly.
• The placement of the terminus of the e's tail was most likely chosen by picking a height for the aperture (1.75 units on the outside edge) and then clamping to the nearest tidy slope, which in this case is y = -2/5x. This target aperture size seems to have been constant even after the logo was revised with thicker lettering and caused the actual angle (and slope) to change.

This should be everything you need to generate your own renditions of the above vector faithfully with a good set of eyeballs, and without any risk of loss of precision or detail. I won't go over every single offset value in the design; the vectors speak for themselves. But again, this was not the final logo that NeXT actually used.

Trivia
There are two more unique versions of the logo worth mentioning, both less official than what I've said so far.

The first is the NeXT "jewel," which is (according to filenames) the correct nomenclature for the NeXT logo when it has pretty gradients applied to it to create a 3D effect. The original source images for this are raster-only:

RGB version (48x48), taken from NS 4.0 PR1

RGB-ish version (68x74) taken from loginwindow.app

Mono and CMYK versions (nexthalo.tiff, also from loginwindow.app)

The chunkiness of the text on these versions is quite noticeable at larger sizes. However, the construction of the 'jewel' effect varies slightly cannot be described further beyond what you see here. I tried my hand at making a vector inspired by these once (which is what is actually in that dock screenshot from earlier), and filled in the gap with a beveled ridge, which is not quite what the other versions have, but not all that far off.

The absolute final version of the NeXT logo comes to us from the NS 3.x Developer CD, which included PostScript and RenderMan demos, not just code:

Hi there!

It is not terribly useful, but certainly has a high "neat doohickey" score.

(While writing this post, I realized that the MarCom CD has a directory full of NeXT logos, including a directory named 'specs.' Have I been scooped?! Find out next post...)

[Rhetorica]

The answer is, no, I was not scooped by the MarCom disc. The "specification" in this case was a guide on how to use the 'blocks' logo for different print media—high res vs. low res, color vs. mono. Very uninformative. However, it did bring forth a few other PostScript copies of the NeXT logo, which I have attached. I have not analyzed them technically since there is nothing left to uncover about the original design, but the dates go back as far as 1989, which gives us some idea as to when the thicker lettering was created. (EDIT: I suppose a sanctified vector of the thicker lettering would be useful; I'll see what I can do about that...) The 'rev' version should display as white on black, but modern Illustrator disregards this instruction; Preview.app will display it correctly.

I would also like to take a moment to give a shout-out to Preview.app for its incredibly stanky rendering of the color version of the logo on Windows:

I am unaware of why the color reproduction is so bad; this file (which is attached) looks just fine in other programs. Somewhere, John Pantone is shaking his moneybags and laughing.

Should I make a post about the blocks logo? Vote now with your phones!

[pl212]

Rand's archives are held by a private university in New Haven, Connecticut.  Over a decade ago there was a small exhibition that included these files, so I can provide much higher-res images of two images -- plus a memo from Susan [Kare?] about the review process of the logo by Steve:

[Rhetorica]

Nice finds! I'm seeing thicker lettering on that 1986 letterhead, so maybe they really did get it adjusted right away. The letter itself definitely debunks the idea that Steve was supposed to accept the logo without any modifications!

Susan [Kare?]

Almost certainly Kare, yes. Her biography says she left NeXT after she got tired of styling presentation materials, so she was very close to Steve while there. The icon work at NeXT was all being done by Keith Ohlfs, and she found the medium tedious because it wasn't constrained enough. (It should be recalled that she then went on to do icon design for both OS/2 and Windows, meaning she set the look and feel for virtually all non-workstation desktops at one point in the 90s. Good documentary about her here.)

[pl212]

Yes, and the (late) Keith Ohlfs is completely unappreciated. His later work included the first UX for WebTV.

Always have been curious about the division of labor between Ohlfs and Kare at NeXT...

[Rhetorica]

Re Ohlfs v. Kare: There are a couple of images that strongly hint at being Susan's work. They stand out pretty strongly since they're anthropomorphic and cute, quite unlike e.g. the sexy-but-realistic LipService icon from later:

^{The "Really quit?" guy and "save" icon from Jot could only be Susan.}

^{Conversely, these smoochers were surely made for the male gaze.}

By contrast, this face (top right of the tools panel) was presumably drawn by Keith, since Icon was his baby:

^{Not very cute!}

Finally, we also know of the logo for the later ShowAndTell, which—if it isn't one of Susan's iconic caricatures of Apple employees, is at least certainly trying to be one:

Now give us the fat one!

After much wringing, Claude has also produced a perfected version of the bold lettering. It first appears at the end of the logo presentation booklet and appears to have almost entirely supplanted the original rational 21-module version. NeXT may never have even actually seen the 21-module version from before. I have yet to find an image that I am certain depicts the original drawing, aside from the one on Rand's own site. This means our usage of the "original" is an artifact of the historical process and not actually authentic.

(see my next post for the best vector version)

Two notes:

• The gutters between the panels are corrected to be consistent. I am now unsure of whether or not the original truly had the inconsistency portrayed in the gutters; maybe this was an error in the source PDF on Rand's site.
• The text was thickened by using an 18-module system (the stroke width is 1/18th of the face) instead of the original 21-module system. So, to quantify the differences, we could say the lettering in this version is 16.67% thicker. The product of all these leaves us with a design that must be rendered at a front-face size of 504 px to be exactly pixel-aligned. (This gives us a total document width of 666 px. Nice!)
• The angle on the e's terminus has changed slightly to have the sine of 22.04°, or a slope of y = -0.375x (3/8 instead of 2/5)

Oh, wait. That was three notes. Well, whatever. Enjoy?

(Note to self: do a write-up about colors later.)

[stepleton]

The NeXT logo is GOAT material, but part of me loves imagining the universe where we wound up with the (roughly contemporary) Yale University Press-style mark! Maybe I should get a T-shirt made --- only (the good kind of) Randroids would get it.

[Rhetorica]

The NeXT logo is GOAT material, but part of me loves imagining the universe where we wound up with the (roughly contemporary) Yale University Press-style mark! Maybe I should get a T-shirt made --- only (the good kind of) Randroids would get it.

I think this is a case of "getting it out of one's pen;" sometimes a writer or designer will jot down obvious or lame ideas just to give closure to them. Conversely the hourglass X seems to have held his attention a lot longer!

A bugbear that has been haunting me for a little while: determining exactly how where the tail of the letter 'e' is supposed to end. The current thinking is that it was actually placed using the module system rather than a chosen angle or slope.

(Right-click → Save As to download SVG.)

Under this hypothesis, a straight line drawn between the tail's outer vertex and the rightmost corner of the crossbar is meant to be 1.75 units under the original 21-unit design scheme, and that this distance was copied to the thicker version without switching to the new units. This is why the slope (and angle) vary between the two versions of the logo.

[stepleton]

He couldn't have hated the idea that much or he wouldn't have used it for Yale University Press. Maybe he liked how the letters of YALE interlocked better --- which, they do. (I may have tried my own hand at a Y.U.P. style "NEXT" logo here at home  )

(But I can also believe that the Y.U.P. logo was already about finalised by the time those scribbles were made, and it was just an exercise as you say.)

I'm still smitten with it. What if NeXT but fustier? Maybe in a chaos butterfly way, the entire culture of Silicon Valley would have turned out differently. And even the future we got, we all know that Claude is the tasteful AI service to use because it's the one that's got serifs.

I think we can all agree though that the old Yale University Press logo is much better than the one they use now, and the old UPS logo is much better than the one they use now. Sadly I suspect that NeXT too would have moved on from the Rand logo if it were around today. For a depressing exercise: how do we think NeXT Inc. of 2009 would have "improved" on it?

[Rhetorica]

Sadly I suspect that NeXT too would have moved on from the Rand logo if it were around today. For a depressing exercise: how do we think NeXT Inc. of 2009 would have "improved" on it?

We can actually make a really good educated guess on that one.

The 1993 Marketing and Communications CD-ROM already has a logo that is specific to NEXTSTEP which pulls away significantly from the standard cube:

There are color versions of this on the disc, but they're horrible resolution and I wasn't able to get any of them to display properly. You no doubt know the design, though; it pops up all over the place from 1993 onward:

 

 

The "wobbly woodcut" look is quintessentially 90s: it was easy to render on B&W printers and very common in graphics of the period. The retroactive aesthetic labels "global village coffeehouse" and "mission school" touch on these ideas, but at the time it would have just been understood as part of a greater trend toward "eclectic" design, which was a very broad category that included everything from neon-stained art deco to crooked Memphis-inspired typography. Still, we don't have to look far to find other straight-laced corporations churning out designs with woodcut-like cross-hatching:

  

(These are all from the Microsoft Office ClipArt Gallery.)

So there's a good chance the logo for an independent NeXT throughout the late 90s and early 2000s would have just been something like:

Oddly, this is very close to the logo for "From Software," the developer of the Dark Souls video games.

...which I'm sure we can all agree would have been extremely disappointing, but this was a period of extreme stagnation for corporate branding unless you were trying to appeal to a young and edgy audience. Discounting perturbations for Web 2.0 shininess, many companies in this era reverted to pure Helvetica.

Probably the most interesting evolutionary corridor away from all this is the idea of a monocolor callback; we saw Apple keep its shape, but dump the rainbow. For NeXT, the equivalent might be just the original cube, though that has the downside of looking like something straight out of Mordor. (We can categorically rule out a Slack logo made out of rotated colorful cubes.) NextBSD's logo is a reasonable yet bland rendition of all this.

One thing is certain: anything would be less memorable than the original.

[stepleton]

You think though? (I realise this discussion is getting a little silly, but it's still fun to think about.) I think they would have held on to the tilted cube throughout the decade. Apple didn't go monochrome until August '99; Sun hung onto its logo until Oracle ate them; and of course IBM is still riding with Rand. I feel like the established computing brands mostly tended to avoid changes until the dot com era was truly going. And well, of course, real-life NeXT kept the Rand logo until it had the head-on collision with Apple in 1997, so it would only have needed to hang on for a few more years anyway.

I feel as though a Rand logo still had a cachet through the '90s, and also it would have felt a little gauche to move to something global-village, swoopy, or Memphis right after his death in '96. UPS only "updated" in 2003. The early 2000s are when I think NeXT would have changed, too. Why? New millennium, dot-com sure, but there was one other little thing:



So much for class. Back in those days high financial chicanery was a really bad look, if you can imagine such a thing. Also Rand had been gone for a half-decade by then, and it was a new century anyway; time to move on from bad neighbours.

I hope NeXT wouldn't have fallen back into the pack and made some logo with a kind of boring swoosh around it like you just seemed to see everywhere back then. You know the ones: