“Something that was memorable but meaningless…”

This by far represents the most work I have done for a single post.

Before I bore you with the details of what I did I will give you the actual post:

We are all familiar with big brand logos, for the most part we are aware that there is some mass-marketing machine behind them that has conducted massive amount of research and focus groups to get just the right shade of blue to use for the new at&t logo. Now what is interesting is the design work that goes into logos we are all familiar with that are not associated with major brands and how they were developed.

This week there has been the story going around of the Biohazard symbol. Apparently it was developed in the 1960s and it was developed by the folks at Dow Chemical for use by everyone. And yes, it turns out there were focus groups used to create it along with some other guidelines and the color was chosen for visibility (that would be Blaze Orange).

Okay, that was the post I was going to write. Now the work I did to get to this point:

So I started with this article. I figured I’d get a nice image, maybe check out the Wikipedia and see what they had to say about it. Something to just beef up the post. I went to Wikipedia and found the submission on the Biohazard design and found it was credited to Charles Dullen as opposed to in this piece (supposedly by NY Times Magazine) where the quote and the creation is credited to Charles Baldwin. I decided to correct the Wikipedia entry (my first time correcting one, I have now officially become an active member of Wikipedia now I guess) and linked the same article from above.

Then I freaked for minute “What if that article just had a typo in the name?” I decided to go to the source and scoured the NY Times archives to try and locate the article, which I couldn’t find. Lexis-Nexus wasn’t much help either. The closest I could find was a NY Times ‘Q&A’ from 2002 that named the same folks as the creators of the symbol (Charles Baldwin and Robert S. Runkle. This was in the correction to the article). Fortunately this correction also listed the magazine that they released the symbol in (Science) and the year (1967).

After a bit more digging and searching I was able to locate the Science article (sometimes it is worth while to have access to the online version of a University Library), downloaded it and flipped through it (and for anyone else who would like to find it, it is in Science, Vol. 158, P.264, 1967). Oddly (or maybe not so oddly) it seems like quite a few people have Charles Dullen listed on websites as the creator of the Biohazard symbol. Looks like a few too many people are taking Wikipedia as an infallible reference (which I would have done as well had I not just read the other article).

30 minutes of research for less then 150 words. This is why I am not an actual reporter. Of course in the future I also plan on just ‘correcting’ Wikipedia articles so that they back up my arguments. It is fun when you can be ‘right’ all the time.