People never like new things. I think it's fine, and trust the designers at Slack worked diligent on a direction they wanted for the logo and are likely more talented than 99% of the people here shitting on it.
they couldn't stop paying the designers
.A lot of people are seeing a swastika... a swastika points towards the opposite side though.
Can't unsee now.
The last design was the pound sign / hashtag. THIS is less distinctive than something on your keyboard?
Think Discord but for work lol.
My job is starting to use slack. Is it basically just a job messaging tool?
We also use Skype for our chats but don't really see the difference.
Funny enough, our friends discovered Slack before Discord, so I have three Slack groups for friends and one for fantasy football.
The last design was the pound sign / hashtag. THIS is less distinctive than something on your keyboard?
The reason it was a hashtag is it's because it's used extensively in the app. The new logo doesn't appear to represent anything - maybe speech bubbles at a stretch. I can see why they changed it, but they could have done better.
I'm really surprised they went in this direction. Seems so noisy.
The only reason I could see them going for a more complex, noisier logo is that it's tough to protect their IP on a symbol that's part of the public domain and used everywhere to have a very different meaning. Most people identify the pound/hash symbol either as a number sign (#1) or as a hashtag (#NotAllPenguins), and while pound/hash can be used as a hashtag within slack, it's not really the primary functionality of slack, and it could give an impression that the product is a social media product instead of a workplace collaboration/communication tool.
Still, it's kinda rare to see companies making more complex logos these days.
I voted 'Undecided' because everybody hates new logos and then you quickly come to get used to them and then in most cases you realize the new logo is better than the old logo, and you later think "ugh, that old logo is SO ugly"
All the channels are prefixed with the pound sign though(which itself is a holdover from IRC). I think it's closer to their actual functionality than you're describing
Oh, that's true, forgot about that. I wonder if maybe they're going to start to move away from that... There's really no reason the channels are prefixed with it, and I think most people still identify # as a hashtag on something like Twitter, so if you're not a customer you might get the impression that Slack is similar to Twitter or serves the same purpose.
Or, who knows, maybe they got sued by Bell Labs.
I liked the old logo more (Well as of today I do, I'm sure I'll get used to the new one and then forget about the old one), but just trying to rationalize why they'd go or a way noisier, more complex, less familiar logo in this day and age when almost every new logo design goes in the opposite direction.
They detail that in their blog post.
The old design had overlapping colors, so there were about 11 distinctive colors in the logo, making it hard for people to easily reproduce and it was too often done incorrectly. Also, they didn't like when people didn't put the logo on the correct 18 degree axis tilt.
They also had several logos across devices because of this (a simple black & white one, a plain "S" design without the pound/hash symbol, etc).
So they wanted something with a simpler color design with no tilt.
https://slackhq.com/say-hello-new-logo