Before I had my MacBook Pro, I always wanted a VAIO, until I had a go on my mate’s mac and found out the Tiger was so much better than Windows. Yes I didn’t want a MacBook Pro for its look, but I wanted a VAIO, largely because I wanted that logo on the top of my computer so badly!
Maybe it sounds stupid if I bought a computer because its logo looks nice, but for some reason, I love that VAIO logo, to me, it’s one of the best logo designs on the world.
VAIO stands for Visual Audio Intelligence Organizer, which is a rather unattractive name and it doesn’t tell you it’s a computer. It is Sony’s computer department, and Sony is one of the companies in the world I admire the most, mostly for their technological innovations and their achievements in the field of portable audio products.
Some of their models comes with the logo painted on the front, and to be honest, they just look normal. However on most of the more expensive Sony computers, that logo is often a piece of cut metal and mounted on the front of the computer, and that, to me, is a thing of beauty. The computers suddenly feels more expensive and more exclusive with that little metal badge.
When I was young and had never herd of Wikipedia, I always imagined that the morph of those four letters represents a wave of rhythm and a switch, the little dot in the A acts as an eye and it makes the whole picture a lot more lively. Thanks to Wikipedia and now I know that the VA in this logo represents an analog wave, and IO is a digital binary code. So the VAIO represents a combination of nature and science.
Still I think it could be read as a wave of rhythm with a switch and a lively eye. Logo designers try very hard to think what their designs represent, I think Sony’s designers did very well on delivering the image they want their products to have. It’s simple, it looks technological, it’s elegant, the metal badges look like they were made with delicacy. Same as the way they marketed their computer products. Sony are not the first name people would talk about when it comes to computing, but over the years they have so many innovations and they have contributed so much to computer design. The first laptop to have a camera on the top of the screen, first laptop with two separate graphic cards, first laptop screen with LED backlight, first laptop to have carbon-fibre as material, first laptop with a Blu-Ray drive, and although the keyboard design on the current Apple MacBook Pro looks very Apple, it had first appeared on a VAIO back in the 90’s.
I think the VAIO logo is a classic sample of a good logo design, while it delivers the information the designers wanted it to have, people can still read it clearly as VAIO. Having a pretty logo might not be a key element when people are considering buying a new computer, but when they are struggling between choices, like Tesco said, every little helps.
Images are from Google.
Tomorrow’s topic: Kennedy standard retractable trimming knife
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