Pentabulous! Fifth MBP Bake Successful

I’m sure for most of you this is getting old (so just buy a new Mac already!). But for me, my investment is being stretched past three years (next month) and I’m still holding out an outside hope that Apple may have a change of heart and decide to include this symptom in the Nvidia case and I’ll get the logic board replaced free and be able to pass it on down to my progeny. I know the symptom is pretty common because this site gets quite a bit of traffic based upon baking a MacBook Pro and this model (A1261) in particular. For those of you that are looking at the possibility of baking your logic board, if you haven’t already, check out the previous articles I’ve posted, specifically beginning with Cooking the Books.

Back to the point of this post–on January 31st, after slightly over four months of up-time (which has been the longest time by a month so far), and right in the middle of huge web launch deadline, my MBP refused to wake up that Friday morning. This time, for the first time, with no peripherals attached when put to sleep by closing the lid–so that kinda blew my peripherals-affecting-the-sleep-mode theory. I went to work going through the now very familiar process of tearing down, baking and putting it all back together. It can be noted that just the weekend before, I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard OSX 10.6.6 from 10.5.8 and upgraded my original 250GB hard drive to 500GB. I don’t think that had anything to do with the last failure, as it was working swimmingly that whole week, but it’s worth noting.

The encouraging news for anybody who has made the commitment or about to make the commitment to bake their logic board, is that in this case, my board has been baked successfully five times. Of course, that is all contingent upon your definition of encouragement.

Here are the (now four) previous MBP Baking Series articles:

Cooking the Books (or, Baking My MacBook Pro Logic Board)
Twice-Baked Mother Board (or Refried Logic of my MacBook Pro)
Ooops! I Baked It Again. (3rd Time!)
It’s Officially a Quad-Baked MacBook Pro (4 Times and Counting)

You can tell I’m running out of steam for creative titles. Next will be something to do with Hexes I’m sure.

Verizon’s First iPhone Commercial

And so, it begins…

If only it would begin on T-Mobile.

My Take On Starbucks Logo Evolution

In light of Starbucks choosing to update their logo on their cups for their 40th anniversary by streamlining and isolating the mark and ditching the name to join the ranks of iconic brands Nike and Apple. Rather than get angry, I thought I would give it my (tongue firmly in cheek) take on what I think would be the next logical evolution of the iconic brandmark.

My take on the change as a designer, I think I would have explored a containing ring around the mark, and maybe even tried experimenting with size and orientation (which I would assume was part of their internal process), but I take my hat off to them for making a gutsy decision to take the next step and elevate the brand above being just about “coffee”. I think that removing the concentric ring, takes it out of the crest-style and negates the need to let it stand in isolation. I think they could have had a little more fun with it. But I also understand their desire to not mess too much more with the equity in the existing imagery. Would love to see the stages of exploration that they went through to arrive at their final design.

Fellow designers, don’t be too critical of my execution, this was just meant to be a quick, five-minute diversion that like all jobs that take three times longer than planned, turned out to take 15 minutes. So, there are nuances of curves that I would normally take more pains to smooth, etc. Also, the fact that by focusing on just the face, I realize that several other key elements to establishing the iconography are missing, notably the star-crown, hair and mermaidish apparitions of the siren. In hindsight, and if I had the time to indulge, I would have added at least two other steps in the evolutionary chain showing a more gradual reduction. The goal here was getting it to it’s minimal essence—actually, more like past it.

I think I’ll go put another pot of coffee on. And, get back to werk.

NY Times Article on Colleges vs. High School Logo Trademark Infringement Battles

Just thought I’d post a quick link to a New York Times article that ran today that outlines the plight of high schools across the country that are facing the legal issues of trademark infringement with the colleges and universities that they have “borrowed” for their own mascot logos. Buna High School and Penn State are mentioned very briefly in passing, but it’s resulted in an increase of searches reaching the original Buna Trademark Infringement article I posted back in June.

Colleges Tell High Schools Logos Are Off Limits

I think the bottom-line is that it’s easy to think of the big schools as the “bullies” picking on these poor little ol’ high schools who just want to have a decent mascot to showcase their school pride, but it highlights the issue of how valuable an identity can be to an organization that has invested resources, both financial and the physical effort of building a winning sports program that elevates the status of that mascot identity and how important it is to protect that investment from being trivialized by overuse by other organizations that haven’t made that same investment.

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Design As a Franchise-able Commodity? or, Is a Logo Worth More Than an Inkjet Printer?

I recently had a book recommended to me by a friend that has evidently been must-reading for entrepreneurs for years called, The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael E. Gerber. I was aware of the book, but it had never been on my reading list. After my friend flat-out told me that, “You have to read this book” while simultaneously thrusting his well-worn copy into my hands I decided to take him up on his exhortation. While it has more of a Zen influence then I would like, I still found myself quite captivated with all of the business possibilities it stirred up in my mind (and heart). While there were many insightful sections that have stirred me to re-evaluate my own business model, I found myself in a bit of a frustrating quandary. For those who haven’t read the book, I won’t spoil too much (other than they all die in the end) by revealing that much of the business model is based upon developing a franchise-able vision for your company. My quandary was that I could not reconcile my appreciation for the franchise model which relies on developing systems that deliver quantifiable and repeatable, consistent results, with the reality of my business which at its very essence relies on uniqueness, abstract thought, subjective opinion and thinking “outside the box” as it were. How could a design business be modeled as a business that could be franchised?

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