R.I.P. World Hum’s Old Globe
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 12.23.08 | 4:20 PM ET
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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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
TambourineMan 12.24.08 | 3:55 AM ET
Nah man, that dumb old squiggle globe sucked.
I’m kidding. Nice tribute, Mike. I miss it too. Happy Christmas/Kwanza/Hanukkah (what else am I forgetting?) to all at The Hum.
Jerry Haines 12.24.08 | 6:38 AM ET
Actually, I kind of liked the old globe. Sort of like a child’s well-loved and abused cuddly toy. But it never occurred to me that the squiggles signified humming: I always thought it was a hot day and the globe, like a lot of us travelers, um, could use a deodorant.
Bethany Shaffer 12.24.08 | 10:43 AM ET
Love the new look. The new globe illustrates “humming” much better than the former. The old globe was appropriate and sweet but the new look definitely signals a change forward.
Grizzly Bear Mom 12.26.08 | 1:13 PM ET
To me the lines emanating from the world show its rotation, or more importantly OUR growth into lovers of our Mother and brothers. I love but can’t remember the old one. Can you post a graphic?
Marilyn Terrell 12.27.08 | 11:46 AM ET
I loved that cute little flattened globe. I always thought the squiggly lines meant it was happy!