New HP Logo will need to be frequently cleaned with a Q-tip

I quite like HP's new logo (right), which the company paid for but has not yet implemented. It's a simple, clean, and unmistakable distillation of its established identity.

But as Armin at Brand New says, it's not quite there: "HP still feels like a stodgy PC company trying to be cool."

The ascender and descender are a bit too long, and it could also be BP's new logo, but for me, the real problem is that it evokes the past in an unfortunate way. It looks like the cooling vent greebling on yesteryear's consumer electronics. You know, the bars and troughs that get filled with dust, and require Q-tips to clean (or, in a pinch, a rolled-up wad of paper chewed to a point). You can find them on many computers, but not so many in this decade; the Atari 2600 video console, released in the 1970s, is as good an example as any.