2010 | write/geek

Corporate logos, visual puns and the juvenile brain that just didn’t get it

When I was young, I just didn’t get it.

See, I was located squarely in Piaget’s pre-operational stage of development, and something funny seems to happen there: you’re only able to take things at face value, missing out on subtlety, double-meanings, sarcasm… and all that good stuff that isn’t stated bluntly. Once you’re a fully cognizant individual, you can appreciate all of that.

As a teen, or perhaps slightly earlier, I was suddenly able to see these sorts of things for what they really were. Well, most things. But for a certain class of things that I first experienced during my pre-op stage, I continued having trouble seeing them for what they truly represented. Here’s an example:

the classic Burger King logo When I was growing up, this was the Burger King logo. (I also walked uphill to school in the South Florida snow, both ways. Kids these days.) It’s pretty simple, right? The words represented the meat, between a couple of buns. To whom was that not abundantly clear that the logo is a burger?

To me.

I didn’t realize that until I was a bit older (high school, maybe), at which point it just hit me. It was not for lack of exposure; I had been eating at Burger King practically since birth. I had a birthday party there in elementary school. I was in the goddamn Burger King Kids Club!

The fact that I was exposed to this logo so early in life is precisely why I took it for granted. I missed the visual pun; as far as I was concerned, the logo looked the way it did because that was just what the Burger King logo looked like. I simply couldn’t imagine it any other way, or having any other purpose than telling people who see it on the side of a building that they’re looking at a Burger King location.

I had no such difficulty with the stupid-simple McDonald’s arches. It’s just a big “M.”

old-school Milwaukee Brewers logo Here’s another example of a logo I didn’t fully understand or appreciate. For the record, I wasn’t a Milwaukee Brewers fan, but at the age of four or five (and thanks to a friend’s father) I found myself with a huge collection of contemporary baseball cards. Again, until I was much older, all I saw in this logo was a stylized baseball and glove… which to a child, seems a perfectly appropriate logo for a baseball team. And your average sports-team logo is on the literal side.

I believe it was at some point in college that I noticed the subtle lettering in the Brewers’ logo. What a brilliant design!

There’s a completely different class of logos that are more subtle, with something intentionally hidden within. You don’t need to be a youngster to miss it.

These tend to be great:

the Goodwill logo the FedEx logo Amazon.com logo

The FedEx logo is widely celebrated, its pun masterfully subtle. It only occurred to me it a few years ago, while driving to work one day. I was behind a FedEx truck. Then it hit me. (Thank you, I will be here all week.)

As for the Goodwill logo, this blog comment made me see the light, or rather, the huge “g” in negative space. I had always just seen it as a face.

The day I realized that the Amazon logo wasn’t mean to be a smirk was the day I saw the A -> Z.

Can you think of any other good examples?

The right way to eat a Reese’s

Perhaps as a copywriter, but more likely as a consumer of media, ads tend to stick in my head, and the tagline that claimed there’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s has stuck better than most. I’m surprised to find that, at least according to the Wikipedia article, the tagline hasn’t been in use for some time now!

I’d still like to challenge the claim… or at least propose that one method may be superior to others, if you value chocolate-free fingers. I understand that there is sometimes enough overhang from the paper lining so that it’s possible to remove it without getting chocolate on one’s fingers, but this is hardly a sure bet.

(This… erm, lifehack, is suggested for use with Reese’s Minis. The same principle could be applied to full-size Reese’s, but as we will see in step four, these are missing something important!)

1. Place candy on a flat surface and admire it. (Optionally photograph it, if unwrapping for the purpose of a how-to blog.)

2. Unwrap foil as normal.

3. Fold two opposite corners of foil inwards.

4. (The important step) Grip the two folded corners with thumbs, with the folded corners service as a buffer between your thumbs and the chocolate. Apply force with thumbs and forefingers to separate paper lining from chocolate.

5. Admire, but only for a moment. There’s candy waiting to be enjoyed!

6. Enjoy (assuming you enjoy this sort of thing)!

Happy Valentine’s Day

To my small in size, but large in stature, readership, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I love all of you. <3

(n.b. This offer of one (1) unit of platonic love applies to current readership only, as of the moment of publishing. Whether this offer will be extended to future readers remains to be seen, and is expressly not guaranteed. While extension to future readers is decided on a reader-by-reader basis, subscribing to my RSS feed would not hurt your chances, and almost certainly puts you on the fast track to my heart. Offer not available where prohibited. Your mileage may vary.)

The case of the disappearing, reappearing dictionary

I was a voracious reader from a rather early age. I recall having had my reading level, in first or second grade, assessed at that of an eighth-grader.

My reading prowess could be attributed to a few things, like my parents reading to me from a young age, and often encouraging me to read to them. More importantly, if I came across a word I didn’t know and asked them what it meant, they almost always made me go look it up in the dictionary. I had a children’s dictionary that I adored, but for words that didn’t appear in there, I’d use their musty collegiate dictionary. This fostered an environment where literally no word was beyond my comprehension, an empowering feeling for a pre-geek with a single-digit age!

As I grew up, I didn’t always manage to keep reading with such volume and tenacity, and today, while I read tons of bits and blogs from the Web, long-form content isn’t something I take in a lot of. When I do, it tends to be an e-book. (I read these, in epub format, on my Android phone using the excellent open-source FBReader. Yes, reading off of a small backlit screen sucks, but this is mitigated by a nice serif font and the knowledge that, as I’m often reading in the dark, I wouldn’t really be able to read any other way.)

As I read, still I come across the occasional word I don’t know. These days, my main dictionary (either Free Dictionary Org or Lexicon Lite) also lives inside of my phone. FBReader doesn’t have its own built-in, and to switch to another app is kind of a pain, so I’ve lately been finding myself shrugging off unknown terms. I have become the sort of person who stopped learning new words.

This bothered me, so I decided that, damn the inconvenience, I would start looking up words again. Once I tried, I learned that it actually wasn’t so hard, after all.

The secret (if you could call it that) was to long-hold my phone’s Home button. This is the equivalent to the Alt+Tab key combination in Linux and Windows, which allows you to flip through open apps (only, in Android, it’s a list of the six most recently used apps, open or otherwise). As long as the dictionary is among the last six, it’ll appear in that list… as does FBReader, when it’s time to switch back. This is much more enjoyable than going back to the home screen, flipping open the apps drawer, etc.

I guess that’s a passable not-so-new-anymore year’s resolution: to leave no word un-lexicized.

More introduction (this time, the geek side)

I understand that self-identifying as a geek in 2010 makes me neither cool nor special, now that geeks are considered… you know… cool and special. But having laid out my blogging cred, I’d still like to make the case for the geek side of the equation (equations being something I actually know very little about).

Yep, a distaste for mathematics curtailed dreams of studying computer science, or something along those lines, in college. Back in middle school, however, I was happily hacking BASIC in my school’s Apple //e lab. I had sort of a knack for it; in computer class, I raced through the packet of programs we were required to transcribe faster than anyone else, and began spending my time writing my own programs, which would do things like tell my friend that his favorite football team sucked, repeatedly, through the magic of 20 GOTO 10.

I didn’t really apply this knowledge very well at the time; it would still be a couple of years before I had a computer at home. And even when I finally did, a completely awesome Pentium 166 MHz IBM Aptiva¹ running Windows 95, I didn’t quite know how to get started programming on it.²

Another device appeared in my life a few years after the computer; I received a TI-83 graphing calculator for use in Algebra II. I initially found that it made a great mobile Tetris machine, but it wasn’t until reading Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead, in which he recounted his early days programming primitive computers, that I found myself inspired to do more with it.³

The calculator seemed like a good place to start programming, especially because the user manual contained an entire chapter devoted to teaching the TI-BASIC language! I picked this up pretty quickly, since I still remembered a lot of concepts from Apple BASIC. In my junior year of high school, I was soon writing programs to help me take shortcuts to solving math and science problems. But most importantly, I wanted to make games.

So I made a game. How I did so could be its own entry, and very well may be in the future.

This inspired me to sign up for the Computer Programming I elective in my senior year. They taught us Visual Basic, and the class was neither interesting nor fun. This, paired with the realization that studying computer science in college meant taking lots of math (something I’d always heard, but college course catalogs assured), made it clear that I should focus on the other thing I liked doing: writing.

I majored in communications, and the rest is history. Except for a fruitless foray into Python a couple of years ago, I haven’t programmed much lately.

But I still embody, I think, the hacker ethos. For me, 2005 could also have been called the mythical Year of Linux on the Desktop, thanks to the then-nascent, but still quite amazing, Ubuntu distribution. While it was alien to me, and didn’t quite ‘just work’ on my laptop, I persevered (smug Windows-using friends would say I “suffered”) and use it to this day. I love Ubuntu, and it still… almost just works.

Along the same geek lines, doing more with the devices I own seems to be a recurring theme in my life. These days. I carry in my pocket a rooted Android phone (running CyanogenMod), and at home have a homebrew-enabled Nintendo Wii and DS, a Canon PowerShot sporting CHDK, and Linksys routers running the dd-wrt and Tomato firmwares. My (lack of) skill-set means that you won’t find me helping the cause of hacking open a new device, but I’m glad to file the occasional bug. In short, I like to get as much as possible out of my devices, including, quite literally, my data. Backup is a topic I’ll be coming back to, for sure.

I think that about sums up my geek side (and unintentionally makes a pretty good case for my navel-gazing side).

Mine looked exactly like the tower pictured there![↩]
Let’s remember this when we talk about the iPad.[↩]
My 2010-self is a little embarrassed by having drawn geekspiration from Bill Gates, but you’re reading a truthful blog.[↩]

An introduction

Hello, Internet. It’s Everett, and I’m blogging. I’m sort of new at this.

And at the same time, I’m not.

See, it was 2001 when I first became aware of the fact that people on the Web were writing regularly updated, reverse-chronological content about what they had for breakfast. I was a college freshman. I took up my keyboard and started a blog¹ that no longer exists, on a service that I didn’t like very much (but is still around today).

After a few months there, I started a LiveJournal that exists to this day, but hasn’t been regularly updated in a number of years. I was once a paid user of LiveJournal, an acknowledged contributor to the project and, simply, a humongous fan.

Something changed in my life, a few years later, around the time I finished college. Perhaps I no longer felt the need to tell the world what I was having for breakfast (of course, today that’s Twitter’s job), or maybe my life got a lot less noteworthy (if it had ever been). Maybe LiveJournal’s multiple changes in ownership tarnished its image. Or maybe all the cool kids moved on to pure social networking services, which were coming of age at that point.

It was probably a combination of these things, plus another big one: I was hired to work in a public-facing role at blogging/social networking/photo sharing/etc. service extraordinaire Multiply.com. To be clear, Multiply didn’t silence me; I made sure I was allowed to continue blogging elsewhere before taking the position. But having a real job, one that had me among other things, blogging, simply wasn’t conducive to after-hours blogging.

With all of this in the past, I think it’s time I start blogging again. Everyone’s cat has a blog, in which they discuss what they ate for breakfast, so why don’t I?

Okay, now I do.

Though I was at the time unaware of the term “blog,” which was by no means in common use in 2001[↩]