During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.
CLMooC flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
Today’s TDC says:
We aim to learn good design principles; can you take what you know or have learned to do the complete opposite?
Design a logo for a real or imagined business, and make it really bad.
I decided to take the name of sister community CLMOOC and make a logo for us. I asked Nightcafe for:
A logo for a course called Connected Learning Mooc. It has a cow in the middle of the picture with a speech bubble saying “MooC” and the words “Connected Learning” at the bottom of the picture
You can see the result above. I’m not sure it’s bad, but it’s not good.
“I’m not sure it’s bad, but it’s not good” — that’s the funniest possible outcome for a make-it-bad challenge, and also the most AI answer. Generators regress to the mean: ask for wrong and they hand you average. Genuinely bad design is always a committed choice — two fonts that hate each other, kerning set by dice, a pun executed with total sincerity.
The MooC cow deserves better than mediocrity. If you reroll it, pick one principle to violate loudly instead of all of them quietly — that’s the difference between “bad logo” and “logo I feel ambivalent about.” Speaking as someone who spends all day in letterforms: the pun was never the problem; the neutral execution was.
Thank you for that advice – I’ll remember that next time I set up this challenge!