[skygazer]

Your comment fascinates me, as if you feel you can uniquely tease out the objective from what most consider largely subjective. I'm not contesting, just curious for elaboration. Is it designer hubris, like audiophile, or wine tasting hubris, or a reproducible, measurable thing? Are you implying that he'd be a bad consumer as well, because he responds abnormally, and that other laymen would have less appreciation for the Next logo? Does your experience let you tap into something fundamental? Do people universally react similarly to certain design features in an exploitable way? Is it a percentage game? Or do designers design mainly for other designers? Is it all post-rationalization?

[tomelders]

would that logo look good scaled down on a computer display from 1986? No. It is objectively bad.

All I had to do to invalidate that design was to think of the place it will most often be used.

[coldtea]

>would that logo look good scaled down on a computer display from 1986? No. It is objectively bad.

BS, it looked just fine:

http://www.osdata.com/system/ui/screens/next.jpg

And in fact he printed it in various scales (large to tiny), in both color and black and white, to show how it still looked identifiable and good (not shown properly in TFA, you can find the design studies with the various sizes on the web easily, its part of the same document).