Dispatches From An Exploding Death Star

"Is it true… that your logo is the Death Star exploding?"

I chuckled to myself incredulously, and felt my mouth curl into a smirk that I immediately got self-conscious about and straightened out.

What was this kid talking about?

It was my first time participating a hiring interview at USNC, and we’d just moved to the part of the interview where we ask the candidate if they have any questions for us.

This was the one he decided to lead with.

I had no idea how to respond, so I figured it was better to sit back and watch how the more experienced members of the team would deal with a situation like this.

"For legal reasons, I can neither confirm nor deny..."

No. You're kidding me. You're fucking kidding me.

Our logo is the Death Star exploding? There’s no way. They’re just goofing around.

Right?

I made it through the rest of the conversation without losing my composure, but I stayed dead silent for the remainder. The moment the call ended, I started grilling them.

Yes, allegedly, the logo was based on “the Death Star exploding,” or some version of that.

I’d been at the company for three months, and this was the first I’d ever heard of this. I wasn’t even really sure what they meant. After growing up a Star Wars-obsessed child, there’s no way I could look at our logo every day and miss a detail like that if it was really there. Surely.

A few hours later, I went home and frantically scrubbed through my copy of A New Hope. And during the briefing on Yavin IV, when they’re reviewing the projection, after the proton torpedo goes down the exhaust shaft… there it was.

The company’s logo. Or something enough like it to be unmistakable.

Over the next few days, I worked my way around the office, casually bringing it up. “Did you know our logo is the Death Star exploding?”

Turns out, pretty much everyone there at the time did — everyone but me, the guy whose job description included “managing the USNC brand.”

I had to have an explanation, and boy did I get one. One of the people responsible tried to reassure me it wasn’t actually the Death Star exploding, that it was just a big coincidence. They even wrote out a “brand story” documenting how the logo came into being, complete with variants that looked like they took inspiration from the notorious 2008 Pepsi rebrand document by Arnell everyone in the design world loves to rip on for how tremendously full of shit it is.

At one point, it was suggested that we could put that brand story on the website just to make sure anyone could easily verify that it definitely wasn’t the Death Star exploding.

Not only was that not going to happen, I said, but we were never going to speak about that “brand story” or acknowledge it to anyone, ever again, from then until we could figure out how to make a real rebrand happen.

The logo stayed. Nobody ever brought it up again, for the most part, and suggestions of doing a serious rebrand were quickly shot down. But I never forgot. For me, it became an indicator of something much more important.

This was the first crack in a facade I’d not previously had any particular reason to question. The first evidence I had that they could and would lie about something completely trivial. There was no need for it, no reason to do it, and still… they did.

Prior to USNC, I worked for myself to avoid being put in a position where I was expected to lie, as I’d come to expect of the agency world. My intention was to protect myself from being pressured into lying about big things.

But what insulted me the most about this situation was that they expected me to buy into their lie, and lie myself, about something so small.

A logo.

A fucking logo.

In an industry where people could smell bullshit a mile away, they were willing to lie to my face and everyone else’s about the most trivial thing. And I had to wonder: if they were so comfortable lying about something so obvious, what else were they willing to lie about?

The answer, I would learn, was everything.