The Mac Observer // Logo & Website Launch

Back in 1998, as a budding graphic designer & web developer, I was already working for Bryan Chaffin’s website agency startup WWWebServers when he asked me if I would create a logo & website for his other business: A little Mac news website called “The Mac Observer.”

The website was pretty straight forward at launch. It had a typical top nav and card sorted organizational structure. Over the years the TMO website took on many different CMS frameworks and re-organizations beyond my initial humble and static HTML 2.0 offering.

When designing the visual branding I was already churning out many company logos for WWWebserver’s clients as this was the beginning of the .com boom and many of them did not have digital branding so I thought it would be pretty easy. At first.

When Bryan asked me to create the TMO logo I was obsessed with chonky variants of the Arial typeface so I couldn’t wait to explore different options to show to him. After several iterations and many caffeinated evenings later - what you see here is what we landed on for the final version.

I still can’t believe this logo has remained relatively unchanged for over 20 years. To this day I have a love-hate relationship with it. Even looking at it now I still cringe at some of the mistakes and tiny imperfections I made all those years ago that would only bother other designers.

I’m flattered that they still use it today and hope to one day update the design (if they let me).

DATE: 10/31/1998
CLIENT: The Mac Observer
URL: http://www.macobserver.com

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