6 ms·
IBM Rebus
- willmeyers 3y agoI do really like IBM's design principles. I think they really embraced Paul Rand's aesthetic. Unrelated - what does IBM do nowadays?
- jonfw 3y agoThey print money on hardware (Z), consulting, and red hat. They’re trying to grow in cloud and AI. They’re huge in IP as well
- BetaPictoris 3y agoYeah, IBM's design is fantastic. > Unrelated - what does IBM do nowadays? Cloud, AI (Watson), and quantum computing.
- dralley 3y agoThe visual design of their mainframes and supercomputers is amazing
- 7thaccount 3y agoIBM seems to mainly grow by buying companies and milking support dollars, while keeping a skeleton crew for the product. There's also all the AI hype after Watson. They don't have much hardware left outside of the Z-Machine mainframes which are pretty cool.
- dclowd9901 3y agoDon’t they dabble in quantum computing too?
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoThey were also on the forefront of the "blockchain revolution" several years back. There's worthwhile research coming out of IBM once in a blue moon, but by and large, they seem to be chasing PR trends.
- joshish 3y agoi remember reading about how IBM was consistently granted the most patents by the USPTO for over 25 years; this thread made me take a look and turns out Samsung bested them last year. and, of course, IBM spun it as a shift to "focusing" and that they did it "on purpose". feels like a sign of the times
- kitd 3y agoThey also stopped paying bonuses for patent work. Not surprising it dropped off thereafter.
- 7thaccount 3y agoYeah, but that's probably far less profitable than even their AI business
- icedchai 3y agoThe POWER systems are pretty neat. IBM is one of the last standing commercial Unix vendors w/AIX.
- User23 3y agoGovernment contracting. Those Z series mainframes are pretty much ideal for tasks like running government payroll and pensions. Including in the face of the inevitable congressional brinksmanship.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoI'm surprised that running payroll and pensions for the whole country would take more than one roomful of computing power but what do I know
- russh 3y agoMainly offshore outsourcing.
- epilys 3y agoCheck out his design manual for IBM. https://standardsmanual.com/products/ibm-graphic-design-guide https://standardsmanual.com/products/ibm-graphic-design-guid... It's an incredibly beautiful book, not so for the corporate stuff, but for the elegance in Rand's designs. There's even a section in how all sorts of stationary is supposed to look.
- solardev 3y agoLook wistfully back at its glory days?
- 63 3y agoLots, but very little of it faces the direct public and what little does isn't advertised as from IBM. The company is largely divided into a consulting, research, product development, and mainframes with that last one on its way out (though in all fairness it's been "on its way out" for 30+ years). As other commenters noted, a big portion of the consulting work is for governments because IBM is a trusted brand in the US and frankly is already large enough to have lots of salespeople to work on RFPs and developers who are already used to working slow. They also do a lot of B2B work though. The consulting work IBM does obviously varies per client but it's more modern than the sibling comment insinuates. Their strategy was focused on hybrid multicloud for a few years (the Redhat acquisition was a major part of this so they could push Openshift on customers) but very recently they're trying to make a hard shift to generative AI. IBM's research is even less public than their consulting projects but they love to advertise their work in quantum computing and I've heard they work on patents for chip manufacturing to sell to TSMC and others (don't quote me on this one, it's definitely not my area of expertise). Product development is responsible for maintaining all the proprietary IBM software that they promised to upkeep for god knows how long even though nobody in their right mind actually uses it anymore. At least that's my understanding. They probably do other more relevant things too. IBM does truthfully do interesting work, but they don't really sell to the public anymore so the public only knows them as "that big company that made computers in the 80s and somehow still exists." They also have a big multinational presence I've heard. Lots of expansion in India.
- raverbashing 3y agoDidn't consulting spin-off to Kyndril?
- DebtDeflation 3y agoNo, that was infrastructure services. IBM Consulting is something like 30%+ of IBM's total revenue.
- gustavus 3y agoThey spend their time navigating the bureaucracy of DoD contracts. IBM is still around because they have contracts with the pentagon. Bidding upon these contracts is a route very rarely taken because it is the kind of process that takes years and knowledge that usually can only be recovered using a pentagram. As a result IBM will continue to exist as long as they continue to hold those Defense contracts that are 1. Extremely lucrative, 2. Long term and 3. Very difficult for anyone else to get involved in. But rest assured the entire nuclear arsenal of democracy is currently probably running on an old ASM/400 sitting in the broom closet in some Air Force base somewhere.
- steve-atx-7600 3y agoUnderwhelming
- jfoutz 3y agoI got to spend an afternoon entertaining a logo designer a few years ago. It was really fun and educational. I had some sense of _cool_ logos, and why the FedEx logo was so neat. Learning from that guy though was really eye opening. He had a fondness for the I guess 60's ish design. How do you make something that looks good on the side of a pen, and also looks good on the side of a plane? .5 cm to 5m maybe? familiar? recognizable? This one is a cute puzzle. It doesn't do much for me, but I'd bet back in the day it was amazing to see a company as uptight and powerful as IBM doing something, I guess, whimsical. Yeah, that tape drive is full of dull grey boring tax records. But it's got a sense of humor about it. Logo's are tricky. A good design guideline book is a pretty amazing thing, and there's some of that in the do's and don'ts section. There's something comforting (to my disorganized programmer mind) about seeing the idea fully thought out, how it's supposed to be, and stuff to not do.
- thrtythreeforty 3y agoThe design do's and don'ts always stress me out because once I know the rules, I can't un-see all the violations coworkers make, even if I do my best. Former coworkers will probably recall that I was quite the stickler for the particular shade of red at a previous startup. I hope I didn't get on too many people's nerves :)
- jfoutz 3y agoYou did the right thing. Stay strong! When it's all uniform and consistent it's magic. When it's mushy and weird, it's a lot less magic.
- quickthrower2 3y agoWhere is a good place to learn?
- pmontra 3y agoSome dos and don'ts change over the year. The modern fashion of colorful gradients was frowned upon in the 90s and 2000s as cheap, amateurish, gross. But time passes, memory fade, eventually to stand out you have to start with something from far enough in the past. Rules about scaling logos and making them work in monochrome and color are constant though.
- throw0101a 3y agoOn "rebus": > A rebus (/ˈriːbəs/ REE-bəss) is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter "n". It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoThat's a neat article, but the picture referencing an "escort card" has sent me down a crazy rabbit hole. This is some grade A 19th cringey, red-pill style flirting! I can just see the catalog saying "Cat got your tongue? Women looking at other men? Order our stylish escort cards and you won't be left sitting on our fence! Only five cents!" Look at these insane things: https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/04/21/the-19th-century-escort-cards-with-pick-up-lines-you-definitely-havent-heard-before/ https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/04/21/the-19th-century-e... Half of them have the gall to ask that they be returned if the lady doesn't want to go home with them. Those cards aren't free, after all! And the default-yes "do nothing if you want to sleep with me" wording, my god!
- jansan 3y agoThanks. I was quite confused that I was not able to deduce the meaning of "rebus" from the context.
- rescbr 3y agoThe best thing I got out from my past employment at IBM is an eye-bee-m t-shirt that I (obviously) bought at the company store. This t-shirt, the all-IBM I-shaped brutalist building I worked at, and the customer demo mainframe idly blinking in the lobby all evoked the mighty past of a company bled dry by its senior management. Even the company store selling branded knick-knacks, it somehow made me very proud to work at such a centenary company. The company I left IBM for? Yeah, it's just another Fortune 10 soul-less corporation in a nondescript glass building. Not that IBM wasn't, but at least you could see the computing history on the walls.
- beachy 3y agoI was a second generation IBMer and the best thing I got when I left was a big engineer control panel out of a storage controller - all lights, switches and knobs. It's been sitting for 30 years waiting to be turned into a flashing art piece on the wall.
- ozfive 3y agoIf you have kids or grandkids or even a school nearby why not convert it into a space shuttle control board for them with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. It would be more useful and inspiring for them.
- Cockbrand 3y agoOoh, that reminds me that I have a small status lights panel from some IBM mainframe (with tiny bulbs, not LEDs)... maybe my winter project will be to finally convert it to a geeky desk clock.
- m463 3y agoI still have some small tan paper memo pads with THINK on the cover. also: remember there is ANOTHER ibm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_Magicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_M... (younger at only 101 years old)
- jmprspret 3y agoDon't mean to be rude but... You _bought_ company swag, as an employee? Don't they usually give out like at least a free t-shirt and a mug for everyone?
- holografix 3y agoI joined IBM straight from university about 18 months before Watson at Jeopardy happened. I couldn’t understand what a mess IBM was. I was there for about 30 months. During my time they removed tea bags and instant coffee from the “kitchen” at the office to cut costs. They voluntold me to take a Lean Six Sigma course and I ended up working with a senior colleague on interviewing employees on what they spent their days doing so we could “help them be more efficient”. My god I was so “green”. Finally I saw the light and got the fuck out and joined a ln up and coming SaaS company and the difference was night and day.
- pram 3y agoOh man seeing Six Sigma activated some PTSD from an old job. Haven't seen that mentioned in a decade lol
- sillywalk 3y agoReminds me of 30 Rock: Jack Donaghy : There they are, the Six Sigmas themselves! Liz Lemon : They're dudes? Jack Donaghy : Each of them embodies a pillar of the Six Sigma business philosophy: Teamwork, Insight, Brutality, Male Enhancement, Hand-Shakefulness, and Play Hard.
- jansan 3y agoInterestingly their market capitalization is > $100 billion and the stock price is not that far away from it's all time high.
- drumhead 3y agoWhich is not much really considering the value of their rivals like Microsoft, Amazon, Google or oracle.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoYou have to compare it to the market to see opportunity cost. IBM’s 30, 20, and 10 year total return is 11%, 5%, and 2%. SP500 is 10%, 9%, and 11.5%. And SP500 is much less risk than a single company, so the risk adjusted returns look even worse. https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
- Cockbrand 3y agoI’m still a bit of an IBM fanboy from their days of glory. Of course, I have the Eye Bee M logo on a t-shirt, and slso a vintage “Think” desk sign. Well, at least IBM is still around, in contrast to so many other tech companies that used to be very significant.
- hapidjus 3y agoHow did they miss that the eye in the first image uses #231f20 while the bee and M uses #000
- aaydewod 3y agohuh I don't see it
- kimi 3y agoIs this "rebus" logo any good? I find it pretty bad-looking (while the striped IBM logo is definitely elegant). Done by an intern in an afternoon? I'd understand that, but as a work of art...
- PaulHoule 3y agoI like this page which is linked https://www.ibm.com/design/language/ibm-logos/8-bar https://www.ibm.com/design/language/ibm-logos/8-bar because it goes into great detail of all the little things you have to change to make something like the 8-bar IBM logo look right when you invert it.
- jacknews 3y agoSo this is what I get in my browser (firefox, nothing special): https://imgur.com/a/Ceebssh https://imgur.com/a/Ceebssh The side menu, even collapsed, overlays the content. This is a website lauding IBM design, and yet ... IBM succumbed to financial capitalism around 2000, maybe before (the usual mix of stock buybacks, reorganizations, senseless acquisitions, debt etc, etc, all accompanied by lavish management rewards), and has been been on a slow march to the grave ever since. And this is where we are now, the website, about IBM's design prowess, is not designed to actually work. So sad.
- stuff4ben 3y agoIt looks just fine on my Firefox browser on my Mac.
- jacknews 3y agoLucky you. The point is, getting a website to render correctly across a range of browsers and their specific configurations is not too much of an ask (Well, it's not easy, but the vast majority of other sites manage it), and this one fails.
- aaydewod 3y agolooks fine to me in firefox
- cschmidt 3y agoIf you want to know more about Paul Rand, who is generally considered the greatest logo designer ever, I recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Rand-Steven-Heller/dp/0714839949/ https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Rand-Steven-Heller/dp/0714839949... And his own books on design are all worth a read. He did the classic logos of IBM, NeXT, UPS, Morningstar, Cummins Engine, CBS, Westinghouse, and lots more.
- mrlonglong 3y ago"I'm Bloody Marvellous"