Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is not an uncommon experience though. This is why there's a few things that I'm not opposed to that I know people that are very opposed to. I'm not opposed to Frankensteining options together. To me, it's like I'm giving you a menu of all the things that we can do, but I'm like a chef that puts a menu together where you can combine different appetizers and different mains and they all still make sense. Some people will give you a menu and if you try to do that, it's insane and it tastes terrible. But for me, everything that we're doing, I feel like, mixes and matches fairly well, and I will let you know if it doesn't. It's not unreasonable for clients to go down one path and then use that as validation or confirmation that something that we did much earlier was actually the right way. In that way, if a client ever asks me to do something, they're like, "Let's see it in purple or whatever." There's designers that will really fight you tooth and nail, because they're like, "That is wrong, that is wrong," but I know that some people just have to see it before they can let it go. Sometimes you have to walk down a path before you're able to understand what the right thing to do was all along. That's exactly how it felt for me. Going back to the goals, the different goals people have when they're exploring this, you mentioned there's just little problems with the logo, it doesn't scale, it doesn't print well, that kind of thing. Another goal is people are pivoting and they want to change the vibe and the feel of the brand. What other goals might appear that you've come across why people want to do this? Well, sometimes there's a legibility issue that is really glaring once you see it and then people are too close in to notice it, so this is why it's like you have to show it to a lot of people that aren't familiar with looking at those letter forms and stuff. The one that came to mind immediately when you asked was when I did a refresh for Jeni's Ice Cream, which is a really amazing ice cream brand based out of Columbus, Ohio. They had a few utilitarian things in mind. They had this long J that created this pocket of white space underneath it that made it really hard to design with, but then the biggest glaring one was that they decided to make the apostrophe of the Jeni's over the I as a cool thing. It made the word look like it said penis because of the way that J was drawn. It had a little loop at the top of the J. That was the most specific fix that I've ever had to do, is make the logo not say penis anymore. But yeah, I feel like a lot of it is misreads. When you think about logos and things like that, you want it to be something that, at a super fast glance, people can read it right away. That doesn't mean that everything has to be simple, but it just means that everything has to be incredibly legible, especially when you're starting a new company or you have a less recognizable brand. Because eventually, you become a household name and then people can look at just the color and recognize that it's you or whatever, but it takes a long time building equity before you get that. Until that, it's really important that the legibility is just super tight.…

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