by Art Chantry (art@artchantry.com)
this is the before and after on the jack-in-the-box logo. soon all those old logos will be gone and replaced with the new one that sez, just “jack”. it’s an obvious marketing tie-in with the enormously successful “jack” character created for the commercials that have run over the last decade. they’re among the very best television commercial campaigns of the new century. extremely smart snarky impressive influential work.
a friend of mine is married to the sister of the guy who created (and still creates) that “jack” campaign. he writes them, directs them, and even does the voice of jack. but, he doesn’t physically play jack in the commercials, though. dunno why. he does everything else. wrong body type probably. the guy is a brilliant one-man-band marketing whiz. stunning work and it’s all his baby, too.
but, i have to admit, i’ve always loved that old “jack-in-the-box” logo. this new one seem like a big step backwards is good design thinking – it has so many obvious stupid conceptual flaws in it (i won’t bother to list). so, i’m really going to miss that oldie when it’s gone. i think of it as one of the finest pieces of 1970′s typographic clunk-style logo design still in operation today. when it’s gone, it’ll be the end of an era of heavy-duty bold “bug” logotypes that began back in the late fifties and carried through until the early eighties, when designers like charles spencer anderson re-directed corporate logo design back into the illustrative and pictorial territories (classic post modern appropriation and re-definition). that peculiar design mindset combined with the deluge of historical logo collections (in book form) that swamped the design book market for the first time in the early 1980′s, murdered the “big idea” hard simple corporate mark and it has never re-emerged in any significant way (at least without the ‘retro-nostalgia’ tag liberally applied.) the jack-in-the-crack logo (as we childishly called it back in the day) was the last hold-out classic 1970′s logotype.
frankly, i think the new design doesn’t hold a candle to the old design. i mean, LOOK at the old one! this little trademark has (as far as i can tell) the world record for ligatures!!! by my count this single clunky-chunk rounded-off piece of typography has no less that SEVEN ligatures in it! (i suppose it depends on how you count, though.) it’s amazing. and they’re so good that it’s totally invisible to the eye until somebody like me actually points it out. look at that amazing “CK” or that stunning “THE” or that death defying “OX”!!!! it took real GUTS to even attempt this in a logo, especially back in those olden days of yore. the fact that it worked so well for so long and so completely invisible to the average casual viewer only cements it’s secure place in design history. i love this thing.
like the infamous “stealth” logo re-design of fed-ex, this is one of those amazing feats that flew under the radar until it gets pointed out. c’mon, be honest. i’ll be you never noticed all the ligatures until i pointed them out here, right?
ADDENDUM:
AC:”retro” is a marketing term, not a design style. all it does is “look cool”. honest….now that you show them, i actually remember ALL of them. that first one is awfully hard to forget. i seem to remember one of those still standing in california back in the early 70′s. i t blew my little mind….oh man, that dc logo sucks for all the same reasons this jack logo sucks. nobody knows how design a decent logo any more out there in “young hotshot land”….well, i remember having to deal with the legal status change from ‘tm’ to “r” when i was doing record cover work back in the 90′s. it was a real pain in the ass becausee none of the typesetting machines had the little ‘cirlce R” in their font film strips. so, i constantly had to draw a teeny-tiny cirlce around an ‘R’ and then glue it in place. took more time to do that than actually design the rest of some of those covers i did….beg to differ. it won’t even look cool there. we live in an era of truly bad logo design. it all went to hell about 10-20 years back and only gotten worse since then. terrible stuff being done out there. no brains at all doing them….
…i do think it’s accurate. i’ve been around long enough to learn a few things and actually compare. it’s getting laughable out there. again, in all honesty. logos seem to have become an artform of the past. it’s REALLY bad out there right now. ‘sucky’ doesn’t go far enough…
…over the last twenty years, i’ve been ask to sit in the jury at maybe a dozen or more design competitions. now, i LIKE logos, and i’m a generous judge in these situations. if i can spot any sort of good thinking going into a logo, i vote for it. “clever is good enuff.” but, in all honest, hardly anybody even enters the ‘logo/trademark’ division in design competitions any more. so, those categories are always very very slim. and even tho, i’m generous with my vote, it gets really hard because so many of the few entries have ANY merit at all. and the other design judges usually barely vote for logos at all – they’re almost always far far harder judges than me. i watch them as they work the logo sections and they mostly skim over them because the work is so bad these days. it’s
ten worse as time has gone on, too. there have been many competitions i worked on that eliminated the entire logo category from publication because none of the judges (except me, it seems) would vote for any of the entries. yes, it HAS gotten really bad out there when it comes to good logo design. this is what i’ve seen AND experienced….
…actually, i think the new logo looks like it’s trying to be modern computer screen 3D design – “let’s make this thing look modern”. but, when you look at what graphic design actually LOOKS like online, it’s blindly adherent to the fantasy land of video madness and animated dreamscapes. so, fake 3D is the norm. and that’s what people make when they “think” about design -. it’s what they know. “monkey see/monkey do.” if everybody is looking at screen work and think that’s what graphic design looks like, then that is what logos will look like., right? and this design (and the dc logo and even the new chevron logo) has no logic beyond trying to look like everybody else looks- fit in and modernize the sucker. that’s not design thinking, that’s copycatting and decorative chickenshit thinking. icky stuff all around. ‘gone in 60 seconds’ thinking….
…nowhere did i say ‘everything current is a failure’. that’s pretty crazy talk. i’m saying we make a lot of really lousy logos in the graphics world right now. that’s very different. i actually blame the terrible design education system in our country for this situation. but, nobody wants to hear that….oh, and i also really don’t think the old logo is very ‘good’ either. it’s just so familiar and (i think) far more novel and clever and interesting than the new one – which is just bad….