The Worst Logo of All Time?

The competition for worst logo is fierce, I know, but this one is in the running:


The L growing out of the N, the badly drawn letters (especially the C), the fake italic, the three red snakey swooshy meaningless thingies, the black outline on all of the red elements; yes, all of those are bad. But possibly the worst thing is the vague sense I get that it's a reference to Christianity because the name, New Life, is popular with evangelical churches and the three intertwined irregularities could represent the Trinity. The owner doesn't want to come out and say that, though, because it might hurt business, and so s/he puts a secular spin on it: "Bring New Life To Your Property." Right.

It almost feels unfair to critique it, because it clearly wasn't done by a professional. But it represents a company that's trying to sell professional services, so that makes it all the worse.

Seen on Grand Avenue in Saint Paul.

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Some other bad logos that have caught my eye over the years:

Lumberjack Days

Evolution Diet

Spire

Cell Phone City

Conagra

Artosphere

Readability Is a Cross to Bear

Clearly, I disagree with the people who own this car in many ways:


But the thing that bugs me about it the most is the hideous treatment of the S in Jesus. Yes, that red thing to the left of the license plate says Jesus.

I keep thinking of critiques that include words like "tortured" or "sacrifices legibility" without even trying to pun. Maybe the designer can resurrect some common sense next time.

Mortgage Fraudsters Paying Pittances

Here's an outrageous news story you may not have heard about: the federal government has just settled the case of millions of homeowners who were foreclosed on unethically, inappropriately, and sometimes illegally.

Victims -- ranging from active-duty soldiers who should have been immune to proceedings to people who were "dual tracked" into both refinancing and foreclosure but who lost to foreclosure, and even including some people who were completely current on their mortgages (!) -- will receive somewhere between $125,000 and $500, depending on their circumstances. To compensate for the loss of their homes. Regardless of the value of the homes, or the trauma it caused, or the lack of legal standing to foreclose in the first place.

And -- get this -- the consultants who figured out how much to pay everyone were paid $250 an hour to do the work, which means they received upwards of $10,000 for each of those $500 payments. In total, the amount of money the consultants took home exceeds half the payment to the millions of victims.


At the core of this is a government institution that is completely in the pocket of the banks: the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

As briefly outlined by former New York governor and attorney general Elliot Spitzer in the linked clip, the OCC has been running interference for the banks and the mortgage industry for over a decade. They rushed this settlement to prevent the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from getting their teeth into the mortgage fraudsters.

The list of payouts for various types of wrongful foreclosures can be seen in full here.

It's Amazing Women Get Elected at All

I kind of missed the story about President Obama saying California's Kamala Harris was the best-looking attorney general in America. But when I finally did, I thought it was kind of typical of what happens, though I was disappointed.

Chris Lombardi, writing on Women's Voices for Change, brings together the whole story with links to the best commentary. She wrote,

...the feminist responses, including Irin Carmon at Salon, who noted that “women’s looks are considered public property, to be commented on, uninvited, whether it’s on the street, in a job interview, or in the press. Many people find it quite easy to do, many of them men, and many people who should know better, like Barack Obama. At the Grio, Zerlina Maxwell agreed: “Adding her looks to a list of adjectives describing her talent diminishes her accomplishments, even if the president said it in an off-the-cuff passing comment. Harris should be praised for her record, not her physical allure. Women are not objects who simply exist for male commodification.”

The biggest piece of news in the whole thing, to me, was that the Women's Media Center just published research that found comments about women politicians' appearances -- whether neutral, positive, or negative -- all have negative effects on their poll standings.

As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones explained it,

In the survey, Jane Smith and Dan Jones are pitted against each other in a race for Congress. Both have similar backgrounds, and after reading their bios the survey respondents prefer Jane slightly, 49-48.

Then they read a second story. In one version of the story, there's no physical description of either candidate, and Jane's lead stays pretty much the same. In a second version, there's a neutral description of Jane's appearance. Suddenly she's 5 points behind Dan. In a third version, there's a positive description of her appearance. Now she's 13 points behind Dan. A fourth version that contains a negative description has about the same effect.

In other words, any description hurts Jane. 

Kind of an inverse stereotype threat -- mentioning appearance reminds voters that she's a woman, and so that's what they focus on. It makes me feel sick, but at the same time, I'm happy to have this study to point to and hope journalists and particularly editors hear about it and take it to heart.

Tramping the Dirt Down

Since I first heard Elvis Costello's song "Tramp the Dirt Down" around 1990, I've wondered what would happen when Margaret Thatcher finally died. Would he still feel the same? Would he speak out? How would the song be thought of when a bunch of people who liked her and her accomplishments were in mourning?

Today is my chance to see. It sounds like it's all playing out as one might have predicted: Thatcher's fans are intoning that no one should speak ill of the dead. These are the same people, generally, who had no compunction about reviling Hugo Chavez a just one short month ago. We'll wait and see what they have to say about Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama when their times come.

So here are the lyrics to "Tramp the Dirt Down," which is probably the angriest song I've ever heard.

I saw a newspaper picture from the political campaign.
A woman was kissing a child, who was obviously in pain.
She spills with compassion, as that young child's face in her hands she grips.
Can you imagine all that greed and avarice coming down on that child's lips?

Well I hope I don't die too soon. I pray the Lord my soul to save.
Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave
Because there's one thing I know: I'd like to live long enough to savour
That's when they finally put you in the ground, I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.

When England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as the black tar macadam,
Well I hope that she sleeps well at night, isn't haunted by every tiny detail
'Cos when she held that lovely face in her hands, all she thought of was betrayal

And now the cynical ones say that it all ends the same in the long run
Try telling that to the desperate father who just squeezed the life from his only son
And how it's only voices in your head and dreams you never dreamt
Try telling him the subtle difference between justice and contempt.

Try telling me she isn't angry with this pitiful discontent
When they flaunt it in your face as you line up for punishment
And then expect you to say "Thank you", straighten up, look proud and pleased
Because you've only got the symptoms, you haven't got the whole disease

Just like a schoolboy, whose head's like a tin-can
filled up with dreams then poured down the drain
Try telling that to the boys on both sides, being blown to bits or beaten and maimed.
Who takes all the glory and none of the shame.

Well I hope you live long now, I pray the Lord your soul to keep.
I think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep.
I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap.

'Cos when they finally put you in the ground,
They'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down.

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Update: Billy Bragg had this to say about Thatcher's death on Facebook:

This is not a time for celebration. The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing; of why domestic growth is driven by credit, not by real incomes; of why tax-payers are forced to top up wages; of why a spiteful government seeks to penalise the poor for having an extra bedroom; of why Rupert Murdoch became so powerful; of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society.

Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate — organise!

A Familiar Posture

From Twitter user Nathan Bashaw:


His title for the image: Clearly checking Twitter ;)

Stupidity Taxes

I was looking through some partially written posts and came across this one from 2011:

It's easy to think that state-run gambling is, in effect, a stupidity tax. But it's probably more fair to call it a hopelessness tax, or an unfair taking advantage of the way our human brains are wired (see Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide).

I will never have to pay this particular tax because -- I really do believe I can say for sure -- I will never gamble. But having the state create opportunities for people to waste their money this way, so that it can siphon off most of it, seems quite different from another tax I'll never pay -- the cigarette tax.

In that case, cigarettes already existed and the state placed a tax on them, in part to decrease the number of sales by raising the price. The equivalent with gambling would be if the state taxed existing gambling, thus raising its price. Not sure what I think of that exactly, but I prefer it to the state opening its own casinos, racinos, or numbers games.

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Now here we are in 2013, and Minnesota has committed to pay for a new Vikings stadium by allowing a brand-new gambling technology, electronic pull-tabs. But the revenue projections are coming in very short, like under 10 percent. Oops.

I hope this highlights the stupidity-tax nature of gambling for those who don't usually see it. No one wants to play these "games," and as a result the rest of us are going to have to make up the difference.

Unless the state can manage to stay strong in negotiations and insist that the Vikings come up with the missing revenue from a seat tax on the people who directly benefit from the team's presence.

Now there's a more appropriate example of a stupidity tax.

Another Look at Income Inequality

If you take all of the income growth in the U.S. since 1966 and make a bar graph of who got it, you'd see something like this.


If you look at the full-size graphic, the left bar is one inch tall and represents $59. This is how much the bottom 10 percent of income earners got, in real dollars. A little over a a dollar a year.

Leaving out the middle 80 percent allows us to focus on the contrast with the top 10 percent in the three other bars. The first tall bar is the entire top 10 percent. The middle tall bar is the top 1 percent. And the right-hand bar is the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

Note the white arrows above the three tall bars that indicate how much farther those bars would have to extend to show how much income those percentiles gained: 163 feet -- 884 feet -- and 4.9 miles.

The top 1 percent enjoyed 81 percent of all the increased income since 2009. Just over half of the gains went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and 39 percent of the gains went to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

Ponder that last fact for a moment -- the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, those making at least $7.97 million in 2011, enjoyed 39 percent of all the income gains in America. In a nation of 158.4 million households, just 15,837 of them received 39 cents out of every dollar of increased income.

The write-up and graph were done by David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who now teaches at Syracuse University, based on analysis of IRS data by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. I guess that means this doesn't include all the income sheltered in the Caymans.

Via Boing Boing

Call the EPA

Is there a new kind of air pollution in Minneapolis?


Seen at the Midtown Global Market.

So Much Sameness in a World of Diversity

If you're not in the design business, you may not know that the use of photography has completely changed over the past 20 years.

In the early 1990s and before, you could hire a photographer to shoot images you needed, and often that was the best option. There were stock photo books, too, but they were exclusively what is called "rights managed." That meant you would find a photo you wanted to use, contact the photo house, and then negotiate a one-time-use price, based on how many people were going to see the printed piece and in what context. Essentially, they wanted to know what the print run was and whether it was for advertising (more expensive) or editorial (cheaper) use.

In the mid-1990s, just as the web was taking off, a company called PhotoDisc launched. It licensed "royalty-free" photos on CDs. These were photos that you could use multiple times, without regard to viewership or context. You didn't own them, but you weren't restricted much in their use, either, and they were a lot cheaper than rights-managed images.

PhotoDisc sent out catalogs, from which you could select photo sets. You called them up, paid, and then they would send your images by mail on a disc. Very roundabout, compared to licensing photos on a website, I know, but it was a big advance. Starting in 1995, they began doing payment and downloads from their website; it was probably the earliest ecommerce I did.

PhotoDisc was famous for "object" photos, sometimes with hands holding things, taken against a white background. And does anyone else remember the distorted photos of people who were shot from overhead, with their lower body made tiny by forced perspective? Those were hot for a while, too.

The company later was later bought by Getty, which also owns the ubiquitous istockphoto.com and many other image collections. Getty's largest competition now is Corbis, owned by Microsoft.

All this is background to this excellent example of what happens in a world full of stock photography.


This would never have happened in 1990. Click to enlarge and enjoy the sameness that is arms-crossed-wearing-scrubs-smiling-woman.

Via Twitter user Megan McCarthy

Overlooking 10 Things

I know I'm not the only person who reads the Wall Street Journal package that runs in the Sunday Star Tribune (and, I imagine, other newspapers around the country). But am I also the only person who finds the format of this recurring feature problematic?


Every week, I go through the same routine. First, I read the headline, in this case, "...Financial Advisers Won't Tell You."

Which makes very little sense. So I look at it a bit closer and notice there's a little shield thingy on the left side of the page that says 10 THINGS. And I realize I'm supposed to read that before I read the headline.

Sorry, Wall Street Journal designers, it doesn't read through. I have no idea how many times I've seen this layout over the weeks or months, and I never read it the way intended. The shield isn't lined up with the headline, it doesn't connect visually, it's small and cluttered, and it just generally doesn't work.

Consider this a user test. You're welcome.

April Fools' Day with Peter Sieruta

It's almost a year since the awful and untimely death of Peter D. Sieruta, creator of collectingchildrensbooks.blogspot.com. I think of him often, and wonder when the book he was working on with coauthors Elizabeth Bird and Jules Danielson will be coming out. (It sounds like it's getting close.)

Today must have been one of his favorite days because almost every year, he wrote an April Fools' Day post. He caught me the first year because I didn't know his tradition, and his words are so deadpan that I was snookered.

Here are his posts:

2012 - A Sunday Brunch with All the News that's Fit to Print

2011 - Charlie Sheen Lands Children's Book Deal

2010 - Mockingjay Giveaway!

2009 - Graveyard Book to Be Stripped of Newbery?

2008 - A Disturbing Article from Today's Newspaper

All are in keeping with an article he wrote for Hornbook back in 1989.

Miss you, Peter. Happy April Fools' Day.