To be fair, there's swastikas hidden in all sorts of innocuous places. It's such a basic shape (which is why it was historically popular) that it's hard to avoid accidentally incorporating one somewhere.
Anything with rotational symmetry runs a high risk of somehow incorporating one.
Good eye. Swastika patterns are always something to beware of when creating a pinwheel based design, whether in a logo, decoration, architecture, or even just pinwheels.
Sun and SGI used to be such rivals, with their headquarters around the corner from each other, and their logos were always bombastically facing each other off and posing together in the trade rags and trade show floors.
I like to imagine them both spinning and swooping around playfully with each other in Logo Heaven.
You mean the one that was deliberately designed to look like a swastika, and even used in black on a white disk in a red field in their flags to underline the “hey, these guys are like Nazis” vibe?
I'm sure a rational discussion about co-opted symbology is what what Slack wants associated with their new icon/logo, rather than many people's visceral gut reaction that is almost certainly independent of the sense of rotation.
1) "Not entirely obvious! A great place for a dogwhistle!" I'm obviously not suggesting that whatever graphic designer intentionally slipped a Nazi symbol into Slack's new logo. But, much like the arrow in FedEx, once you see it it's hard to unsee.
2) Most people can't tell you which way the outer parts of a Nazi swastika go and which way non-Nazi swastikas go. That's what I meant about sense of rotation in my comment above. Moreover, most people can't immediately reconstruct a logo to begin with, though they can recognize one. But something like this https://imgur.com/a/CZWtXez passes at first glance and is much more swastika-y.
> If you put a lower-case "x" to the right of a capital "E" (Ex) you can begin to see a hint of an arrow, though it is clumsy and extremely abstract. I thought that, if I could develop this concept of an "arrow" it could be promoted as a symbol for speed and precision, both FedEx communicative attributes. [...] Once I decided to refine the concept of the embedded arrow, I found that, to make the arrow more legitimate and identifiable, one needed to actually reconstruct the letterforms in order to make the arrow happen.
Anything with rotational symmetry runs a high risk of somehow incorporating one.