I was getting throttled by Steve's sister in Wii Tennis last night, which shouldn't have surprised me. At some point the sweat on my brow began to bleed into the tears in my eyes -- I needed to pause the game.
As I dried myself off, something in the pause menu caught my attention.
It was the tilt of the "e".
That's right, Nintendo astutely designed a crooked "e" for their Wii font. This is a system they've clearly put a lot of thought into (and borrowed a few tricks from Apple along the way) but why the tilted "e"?
The only reason this even got my attention in the first place was because of a branding project I'd done in college on Heineken. Since most of us are still drinking PBR, here's the logo to jog your memory:
Somewhere in the Heineken corporate literature was a reference to these leaning "e"s. It stated (I'm paraphrasing here) that they were specially tilted to convey the brand's easy-going nature and to emphasize the fun of drinking a Heineken.
I didn't believe it when Heineken did it (I still haven't found a beer that didn't make me feel more easy-going and fun). But when Nintendo does it, I have no choice but to respect and trumpet it is an act of design genius.
Therefore, I thought it wouldn't hurt to tilt reddit's "e" for a day. Please let me know if your reddit experience has been heightened in any way.
**the Wii screencapture is not mine, I've ganked it from technabob. It's nothing personal, it just happened to be the first thing that came up on the Google image search. Hopefully they won't goatse me...
5 comments:
The slanted e reminds me so much of the NeXT logo. Remember Steve Jobs' former company, the one Apple bought to get Steve and OS X, nee Rhapsody. In corporate identity graphic designer Paul Rand's logo book, he tilted the e in presenting the logo to Steve.
Interesting. This slanted e appears to have quite the history...
Hey, the link to your blog on redditalien.com seems to be broken.
Hmm, thanks for letting me know. Registerfly is one of the worst registrars I've ever had. In fact, I think I'm going to finally transfer those domains right now...
The tilted E has a storied history.
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