[scrlk]

The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Vote Leave organisation in the 2016 Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for Vote Leave:

> The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/117842715/where-did-t...

[Eric_WVGG]

Diabolical.

I followed your link expecting to see some hack work, and I guess technically it is hack work, but that "ballot box" thing really works.

ugh.

[pinkmuffinere]

I think there’s probably a bit of survivorship bias here — we know if this anecdote because the ballot box concept is actually quite good. But of course there are other “rip offs” that are bad (blonic the hedgehog?). The idea to make a small change was clever imo, but doesn’t guarantee a great design. I think the ballot box design was either “lucky” or “inspired”, perhaps without the creator even realizing it.

[bowsamic]

Dominic Cummings is an absolute mastermind, to a scary degree. One of those people, like Steve Jobs, who I can't help be awed by. Almost as if I live on a lower plane of existence to them

[B1FF_PSUVM]

For other reasons, I had come cross Cummings substack a couple of weeks ago - highly instructive, no wonder he was ejected from UK gov circles ...

[imp0cat]

    I explored the law. Cutting a long story short I figured out a way in which one could (legally) hire someone to pop around to Gould’s house in the middle of the night and go through his bins the night before bin day. For roughly a year I read many documents from the Blair inner circle including notes from Blair. Many of them were market research about the euro. I saw Gould writing memos for Blair who would try out ideas (remember ‘the bridge between Europe and America’?) then Gould tested the results. I tried to counter these moves but, obviously, without being able to tell people that my ‘hunches’ about what Blair was up to were not hunches. For a few thousand quid a month I had a window into the Government’s secret plans.

It's fascinating.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

Thanks, I didn't see that one.

Guess he didn't get the "gentlemen do not read each other's mail" memo - may not be a gentleman at all ...

[_joel]

Yea, maybe shouldn't have gone to Barnard Castle to get his eyes tested though.

[LightBug1]

Reverberations of the Nazi's stealing the Swastika ...