[tvanantwerp]

This feels so generic. I get the problem they're referencing with too many colors and not working in all contexts. But the human mind being what it is, I never had a problem connecting "rainbow-colored #" with "Slack". This...this is just some kind of blob. I couldn't tell this apart from a big pharma company, or some kind of conglomerate that makes everything from toasters to jet planes. I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria, even as far as a generic colorful squarish logo. It's gone from "# means Slack" to "I guess that's Slack...?"

[tpowell]

^THIS.

It does feel generic. I'm actually retroactively impressed that the old one looked so classy using so many colors (pour one out for https://metalab.co, who is doing just fine). I actually loved the different treatments—the Slack brand always felt like one of their strongest assets. It looks like the Joomla logo now – https://www.joomla.org/

[tir]

Agreed, the '#' had a long history of indicating a channel, like on IRC, and by extension text-based communication.

[libertine]

This - the # wasn't a random choice for slack. And there's no shame in that.

[eppsilon]

And for those not familiar with IRC, the association of "#" with Twitter hashtags says "communication" too.

[Infernal]

And for those not familiar with early Twitter, the hashtag was not a feature of the platform, but a shorthand way to indicate a topic. This of course was recognized and formalized by Twitter soon after, but I find it fascinating that it was a feature essentially developed by the users and more simply recognized by the platform later.

[handyman5]

99 Percent Invisible did a whole show on this a while back: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/

[jolmg]

> a shorthand way to indicate a topic

And I imagine it was also inspired by IRC channels.

[sleepybrett]

100% slack is essentially evolved irc.

[jolmg]

The part I quoted was about Twitter, not Slack. Slack's relation to IRC was already mentioned. Essentially, my comment was "Not just Slack, Twitter too was inspired by IRC."

[bobsil1]

It was nice homage to what they were ripping off, I mean modernizing.

[markmark]

To add to the generic feel they've changed the font for "slack" to be very similar to the fonts used by every other tech company ever.

[philsnow]

going through a "rebrand" is not something most companies undertake lightly.

> I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria

IIRC that rebrand was done to distance the company from cancerous associations with the name "Philip Morris", whereas the only reason I can think of for Slack to do this now is to give them a quick short-term publicity boost to make them more relevant to "retail investors" -- that is, this corroborates rumors of a public offering later this year, and imho means that it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

[DonHopkins]

It looks like a # woven out of thread that changes color when it ducks underneath.