R.I.P. World Hum’s Old Globe

Jim’s right. It was time for a change. We needed a new look, and our designer Joe Rivera developed a great one, all the way down to the new World Hum globe. I love it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the old one. I do. It had been a constant on the site—the only constant element, I believe—since the beginning. Now, after more than seven years anchoring World Hum, it’s retired.

It deserves a small tribute.

The original globe was born in 2001, the product of three people and the crude use of Photoshop. Once Jim and I decided we wanted to illustrate World Hum with a humming globe—so clever!—we went about it in a way only two broke freelance writers with no design experience would create a graphic: We started with a painting. We asked my brother Tom, an artist in Hawaii, to paint us a globe. He mailed a piece of thick paper with five globes to my apartment in San Francisco.

I took the paintings to a Kinko’s on Van Ness Ave. and scanned them to a floppy disk. We picked one. To make the globe hum, we drew little squiggles from the earth. Then, to make the graphic fit the height of our logo, we didn’t shrink it. We flattened it. We squeezed it until it fit. Then we saved it at a far-too-small size.

It might have been the crudest, most unorthodox creation of a graphic in travel website history.

We will remember it well.

 

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