Design is a bit of a fashion industry. Lots of people imitating each other. I'm not a designer but I know a few good ones and appreciate good design.
What I appreciate in good design is not only looking good but standing out from the crowd. The problem with imitating others is that you end up looking like everything else. It's not offensive. But also not remarkable or memorable. A lot of web design suffers from being bland and generic.
A few years ago we had an app and our designer came up with an intense shade of red that was slightly pinkish. He then proceeded to use that for our app icon. Net result: it jumped out from all the other icons on the phones apps drawer. The whole app looked fantastic but that icon was awesome. You could not not notice it. Everybody else was using fashionable blues and greens that literally everybody uses.
IMHO the imitation serves a function. Familiarity conveys a message associated with that familiarity, that is the nature of the brand(cheap or high quality, for young or for old etc) and the brands need to update their logos to convey the correct message as their customers churn(people grow up and then get old).
For example, if you are an expensive brand for people of age over 30 but under 50, 20 years later your 30y/o customer will be 50 and will drop out. Now you need to convey to the newly coming of age humans that your brand is expensive high quality one but they associate different styles and symbols with high quality than the previous generations and therefore you will need to re-design your logo to mach the new taste. If the new people don't associate the British royal symbolism with the stuff your brand stands for, you drop them and embrace contemporary symbolism, for example. Therefore, the source of the imitation is not really imitation but an attempt of different brands to capture the new symbolism.
In other words, If everyone drinks coffee in the morning it's not an imitation to serve coffee in the morning.
The expensive brands sell accessories and shoes for that reason. You have to have a model figure to wear a Chanel dress or a Hugo Boss suit, but everyone can do a handbag or shoes.
The way you put this makes it sound like the process of design you described does not create the ecology you described, but it does. Why do you think "the youth" have different tastes? Fashion is constantly being dreamed up by influential brands, and they attempt to impose their vision of the future in such a way that it will become the new norm. This process doesn't just happen by itself. At the same time, outsider styles emerge and become popular by virtue of doing something different and catchy, it is a constant pursuit of holding the banner and commanding attention by many parties. Those who simply chase the style of the day will always be out of the loop because by the time they deliver it's already the past.
Of course the process is not the course of nature but no single brand has the power to design it. Instead, politics happen innovations happen new brands and new lifestyles come and go and each and everything is designed bit by bit but there's a no grand design. There's of course a literature and know how that piles up and the new designs takes cue of those but still, there's no grand design. It just evolves over time as people respond to everything that happens with the world. It doesn't happen by itself as a biological process but it does happen by itself as a sociological process. The biology just defines the pace of it.
True. But this effect isn't limited to design. How many cookie cutter / copy-cat businesses (i.e., apps) do we see? The origin of lack of (brand) identity is rooted in the companies themselves and their leadership.
The irony? Avoiding risk is itself a risk. The higher your chance of failure, the more significant this risk (from self-commodit-izing).
Also maybe a symptom of chasing a quick profit in the short term over other considerations, such as product quality. So better play it safe so the valuation rises by the time the manager/designer/marketer has moved on to another company?
A: Because they need to be legible on a mobile device.
It’s no coincidence this trend started in the 2010s with the arrival of the smartphone. Brands need a consistent look that work across mediums. With over 50% of e-commerce sales happening on mobile, and the dominance of social media in the marketing of, for example, high fashion, a brand mark must excel in these kinds of treatments. Perhaps we’ll find another design trick to facilitate legibility at smaller scales but until then, those marks that looked great in print, aren’t fit for purpose.
Funnily enough, many phone displays have much higher pixel densities than notebook, desktop, and TV displays, and thus would have little problems rendering the serifs, ligatures, and other fancy bits of digital serif typefaces compared to the old 72/96 DPI displays from the late '90s and early 2000s.
Semi-unrelated rant: why do many entirely digital web typefaces have ink traps? They look terrible. On paper, they were meant to be filled in by overflowing ink and thus render the glyphs as intended, but they just look weird and bad on a high-resolution digital display.
I’m aware. But when you’re trying to set a tiny brand mark over a photo in the corner of some social media thumbnail, a screen’s fidelity is not the limiting factor, it’s the human eye.
The pixel density might have increased, but phone screens fit less information than desktop screens, so the logo can't take up as much space. The goal isn't good reproduction, but rather improving legibility and recognisability at small physical sizes.
I have written two blog posts that sort touch on this subject. The increase in screen pixel density has had a much larger impact on web design as a discipline than is commonly acknowledged.
True about the definition, but portrait consumption remains a problem, the horizontal space on the header is much smaller, and many old school logos that worked on stores and websites would end up on two lines on mobiles.
Sure, a restricted subset of serifs and typically when you’re reading a run of text i.e body copy. But the typical neoclassical serifs used in high fashion (think the Vogue logo) with their hairline serifs will look awful scaled to the sizes needed on mobile – regardless of screen definition.
But your corp very likely wants to look young and fresh and not like a very serious, but ultimately boring lawyer agency.
Serif fonts are still existant, with newspapers, lawyers, notaries and aimilar professions. Most modern corporations just don't want to go that direction, because this isn't how they want to be perceived.
Thank you for putting into words something that's I've been wondering about.
Offtopic:
I switched from MPlus Code font to Iosevka just this week for my terminal, VSCode, and Emacs use. Partly due to finding Iosevka more pleasing, its support for ligatures, and liking its italics.
Looking at it now, MPlus is a little simpler while Iosevka has a bit more... Personality?
Serif fonts read fine on any screen with at least a pixel density of Apple's Retina displays. Subjective preferences are another matter, of course. I prefer serifs even on worse displays, because my brain decodes them better. And I will basically refuse to read sans serif in print, or rather, my brain refuses to comply anyway.
It’s the same reason all UX Design went super flat. Flat geometric shapes and text are easier to display at various widths and size’s across a lot of different types of devices. Doing anything more complicated than colored in wireframes is too expensive to produce especially when time to market is important.
As a UX designer I hate this but that’s the reality of why every site has the same boring flat design.
Text is also going out of fashion because supporting multiple languages is expensive compared to just a single set of hieroglyphs for everyone everywhere in the world.
It started before then. My school switched from a rather elegant 19th century (I think) design to something more streamlined that I never really liked around 2000. But I don't really disagree in general. I know when my company did a rebrand, one of the drivers was that the old logo had a lot of fine detail. (It also had some aspects that you couldn't unsee once someone mentioned them and it basically got the company's name wrong--which still gets people confused to this day.)
Their stated purpose was to make it more accessible. The reasoned that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the space intimidating to people who didn’t hold those things to be part of their culture and that it was out of tune with the increasing diversity of their collection and programs.
I think that’s the real trend here: change. Sans is so tempting because it hardly means anything and so designers will tell you it’s a blank canvas you can imbue with whatever values you want. If those values change, you don’t have to tear down your whole identity.
That’s deeply appealing for firms in the tech world considering the rapid change of pace. What’s disappointing to me is to see cultural institutions take the same defensive approach. A logo change is fine, but saying “we want to be accessible to everybody so we’ll strip out anything that ties us to a time, place, or tradition” is like trying to make a welcoming living room by replacing all the sofas, tables, and rugs with a milk crate and a metal foldout chair.
It doesn’t have to be that way. A few miles away the Boston Athenaeum did a rebrand with the same usual rhetoric on accessibility and diversity, but came through with a font that fits their tradition
> Their stated purpose was to make it more accessible. The reasoned that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the space intimidating to people who didn’t hold those things to be part of their culture and that it was out of tune with the increasing diversity of their collection and programs.
Can put this under the dictionary definition of insanity. Or someone needed justification to get paid without doing any real work.
>The reasoned that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the space intimidating to people who didn’t hold those things to be part of their culture and that it was out of tune with the increasing diversity of their collection and programs.
The whole purpose of an actually inclusive "Museum of Fine Arts" should have been the opposite: to make people appreciate, understand, and enjoy things that they don't feel are "part of their culture", expand their cultural horizons and lift their tastes.
Not to excise things they don't identify with, and feed them "safe" stuff tailored to them. That's entertainment.
This is especially true for religious art. Many think religion is not "apart of their culture" because they haven't learned their own history. A museum ought to show the newer generations the good parts of what came before; be it in Islam, Buddhism, Christianity and others.
Yes. To conceive of a museum of fine arts, you also need to have a culture that has a sense of different relative worths of both artistic styles and art artifacts. What belongs to a museum vs what doesn't, what is fine art vs what is commercial crap or kitch, and so on. One that believes in informed curation - curation being the very core of what a museum does.
Of course this requires an era where the opinion of people devoted to studying, discussing, and creating fine art isn't supposed to be equally respected to that of Joe Sixpack, Jaqueline Middlebrow, Joy Belieber, Arthur Incel, or Random J. Person, where everything is up to personal taste.
I don't care for the use of terms that imply appreciating the fine arts is somehow on a "higher plane" and places those who do so above those who don't, but I do think it's worth acknowledging that it takes significant time and effort to develop such appreciation, and that the rewards are subsequently substantial. Personally I've invested significantly in the study and appreciation of Western classical music and I believe what I've gained from that could not be achieved simply by listening to top 40 hits on the radio - but I don't believe those who do only the latter are in anyway "lower" on any sort of ranking system, just that their brains are wired differently, and their cultural background etc. is such that it probably wouldn't make sense for them to make the same investment into music appreciation that I have. It's almost certainly true that they've invested considerably into appreciating other worthwhile aspects of life that I haven't - we can't do it all!
I want to say it makes complete sense to me. It's well known that museums are seen as unappealing to many demographics and the image of association with elitism and colonialism plays a huge role in that. Changing the style choices of museum communications towards ones which are further dissociated from those issues seems like ab obvious first step towrads increasing the perception of inclusivity.
I would ask anyone who is labeling it as "insane" what their own background is how European it is before they dismiss efforts to appeal to groups with other histories, and often painful ones as they relate to European history.
My background is non white child of poor immigrants to the US from a country that used to be ruled by the UK. I just found it unbelievable that anyone would associate a font with “elitism” and “colonialism”. And my family prioritizes going to museums, even in London, where many of my family live even though that is in the country that oppressed them.
I have heard elders complain about the proliferation of the English language itself to be a cause for decline in fluency of the native language, but I can almost guarantee no one has ever thought about the influences of a font. I mean there are actual fish to fry here, starting with legislation, monetary consequences, property rights…I do not see how fonts moves the needle at all, except patting oneself on their back.
> I can almost guarantee no one has ever thought about the influences of a font.
Maybe not but we know that they do affect people's perceptions whether they're conscious of it or not.
I think it's fantastic that your family was engaged with museums while you were growing up but we also know that there's a demographic divide in engagement across the wider
population. In the UK more than half of white families visit museums annually but for black families that's closer to one in three.[0]
> I mean there are actual fish to fry here, starting with legislation, monetary consequences, property rights
100% but those issues are beyond the operational scope of an individual museum trying to improve its engagement.
Of course fonts and their styling represent a feeling. Serif fonts don't represent elitism and colonialism to me, but maybe to some people they might and some museums might want to get away from that. Some serifed logos feel old and stodgy and sometimes updating those gives everything a fresher feel. A museum representing modern art most certainly wants to feel modern and in sync with the current zeitgeist.
Fonts, colors, wording, architecture, etc. all have influences on you, me, and everyone else. They are a form of language and communication and you can both update fonts at the same time as legislation and everything else.
It is insane because this alienates the demographics that appreciate everything you are denouncing here: European history, art, culture, colonialism, civilizational accomplishment etc. Everything that created the very art housed withing the museums.
Even if one is not apart of this heritage, this should be respected as the foundation of the art itself.
> European history, art, culture, colonialism, civilizational accomplishment etc. Everything that created the very art housed withing the museums.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here? Many museums are stuffed with objects taken from around the world, often forecfully. There was such pressure on other cultures to provide objects for Europe that there's even a display in Rotterdam's Wereldmuseum of fascinating objects from the Congo that were made with an intentionally brutal "primitive" aesthetic because that's what the Europeans wanted from them. They even went to the trouble of inventing rotuals associated with these objects.
I guess you could argue that those pieces were somehow created through European colonialism, but even then the designs and implementation were all Congolese.
I think the people who appreciate colonialism are indeed being denounced very intentionally by more and more of the world's cultural insitutions. It's very much intentional.
I don’t question the motivation to be welcoming, but a good motivation doesn’t make a good design.
The result is denuded and unmoored. It’s as soulless here in Boston as it would be if the aesthetic infected cultural institutions in Tokyo or Addis Ababa.
I bet the people in charge meant well, they just did a bad job.
Beauty and soulfulness are very subjective, but I think the way to judge this design is by how successful it was at helping perceptions of inclusivity. I'm not sure if this particular institution publishes data about visitor demographics but I'm sure they have an internal understanding of the value of this change.
Yeah, if they were very well-managed that have metrics not only for success but also for potential loss. And then an honest qualitative evaluation to see changes—good and bad—in the things that are hard to measure but nonetheless important.
I’ve seen very few firms of any sort do that well.
> It's well known that museums are seen as unappealing to many demographics...
So what? These people don't have to go there. There's a whole bunch of places and things I find unappealing, so I don't seek it out.
By destroying culture, you're also robbing people who would appreciate it from an experience. And people who appreciate something can come from all kinds of backgrounds.
Museums can be very inspiring and educational places and can also increase the sense of wellbeing in visitors. Most have it as an aim to bring access to these benefits to a wide range of people. There's also many issues to including contemporary artists from non-traditional background which is a shame for both the creators and people who would potentially enjoy their work.
I'm not sure how an institution using a different typeface with the aim of being more inclusive is "destroying culture" to such a degree that it should be a serious consideration when weighed against the benefits. Could you explain further what you meant by that?
Of course the people who enjoy these things can come from any type of background but first they have to fell welcome to even experience them. Currently in my native country the research shows that white people are almost twice as likely to visit a museum in the first place compared to black people. I personally find that a real shame because I think everyone can benefit from visitng them.
Nobody cares about a font, but if you read the thread you'll see that it's also the architecture that is "oppressive" in the eyes of the ideologues. When you're destroying architecture you're destroying culture. The same technocrats who has filled the world with the most depressing brutalist architecture are claiming that some mysterious "others" suffer greatly from the classical looks of museums.
> Of course the people who enjoy these things can come from any type of background but first they have to fell welcome to even experience them.
And in what way would somebody feel unwelcome by a font? Why is a serif font less welcoming than a sans serif font? When you do the thinking for other people and when you're feeling oppressed on their behalf, maybe you should instead re-evaluate what you're doing. Are you as an enlightened hacker able to appreciate different cultures, expressions, and even typefaces with a cool self-distance, while people who are lesser than you have to be baby-sat by other enlightened individuals that protect them from unfamiliar columns and serifs?
> Are you as an enlightened hacker able to appreciate different cultures, expressions, and even typefaces with a cool self-distance, while people who are lesser than you have to be baby-sat by other enlightened individuals that protect them from unfamiliar columns and serifs?
That's quite a lot of nasty to put onto me and I would ask you not to do that.
I'm not doing anyone's thinking. The position that typography carries associative and emotional weight is not novel here. I think you know very well that serif fonts carry a sense of formality and even authority that sans fonts don't.
I'm also not the one making these changes. I'm not sure why you think these decisions are being left up to me and people like me. The MFABoston has quite a robust inclusivity policy and they not only take on board research on these issues but they also facilitate direct contact where possible from people from various groups outside of their own sphere, including experts and service users/potential service users. Further to that they are also committed to a diversity and inclusivity policy with regards to their staffing, offering things like bias training to staff as well as offering staff "employee resource groups" that support staff who are members of societal groups that face systemic barriers to having their voices heard in order to help them overcome those barriers.
If you have any ideas on things they're missing you can contact them via their website.
> When you're destroying architecture you're destroying culture. The same technocrats who has filled the world with the most depressing brutalist architecture are claiming that some mysterious "others" suffer greatly from the classical looks of museums.
Which technocrats are these? The psychology of architecture is also not a novel idea, but it feels like you're speaking with incredulity here? Deyan Sudjic's The Edifice Complex is a fun book about this. There's a reason the White House looks how it does, it's communicating something and it's asking certain behavioural norms from the people who step inside.
I'm not sure what architecture is being destroyed. Here in Europe such buildings are generally protected from significant redevelopment becaues they're rightly recognised as cultural heritage in and of themselves. Is this a real issue?
> That's quite a lot of nasty to put onto me and I would ask you not to do that.
There is a fully saturated air of superiority in the arguments that you are making and defending. How can you and others take it for granted that people referred to as "many demographics" would at all feel at unease with serif fonts? That sounds 100% made up, because it is. It might be easier to just make up how other people are supposed to feel, instead of getting to know these strange "others", that are just like you.
Why not put yourself in the situation? Let's say you went to a foreign place from yours to visit an important public building. This can be a temple, palace, church, mosque, or even a serif-using museum. Would you find it reasonable to demand they change their architecture and their fonts for you to feel welcome? Would you agree with local custodians, if they argued that you don't have the capacity to appreciate the original style, or would you find it demeaning? Classical Roman style architecture is foreign to my culture, and I greatly appreciate when I can visit such a place, why in the world would I feel unwelcome? That would be like getting mad at the light fixtures.
> I think you know very well that serif fonts carry a sense of formality and even authority that sans fonts don't.
Not at all. Serif fonts are printed in novels, while sans serif fonts are used in forms from the tax office. But even if we entertain that idea, so what? Some places are formal, and every human has the capacity to behave formally and be in formal places – if they chose to.
> Which technocrats are these?
> I'm not sure what architecture is being destroyed.
People who are professionals in city planning. I guess it's ordered differently everywhere under different names. They are technicians and they are making the decisions - hence technocrats. A ton of buildings were torn down during the 1900s to make room for brutalist shoeboxes. What's left is usually protected, as you mention.
> There is a fully saturated air of superiority in the arguments that you are making and defending.
I asked you not to do this, but you're continuing to do so and trying to justify it. I won't engage in this way. Any sense of superiority/inferiority or thought prescriptivism that you're sensing in what I'm saying is something you've projected onto me. I'm talking only about accessibility. This exchange has been bizarre.
I apologize if I interpreted wrongfully your reasoning. I did ask how a serif font is supposed to have the properties described, or why anybody should feel unwelcome by classical architecture, but without much answer IMO.
Here's Erik Spiekermann on the Johnson & Johnson logo change:
"I’m so fed up with marketing people running projects without acknowledging that we designers might have an idea or two about what communicates and what doesn’t. They’ve been told by tech guys and lazy designers that things have to be simplified to work on screens. This is knowledge from the 90s and not true anymore. Risk and guts have been replaced by bullshit “narratives” invented by people who’ve never taken a risk in their lives.
This is the blandification of our world, where fun has to be taken out of the equation because it cannot be quantified. No consumer cares about a company’s internal reorganization, they want to like a brand. When all brands are beige, the beigest one will not win but will be forgotten.
The enshittification of our world is run by people who read spreadsheets in bed and look at their smartphones to tell the weather instead of sticking their heads out of the window.
Sometimes I’m glad I’m old and don’t have to take orders from gutless employed managers anymore. My best clients were those I could argue with. It wasn’t about winning or being right, it was about doing the best work.
Thank you Audi, Deutsche Bahn, BVG, Bosch, Ottobock, The Economist …"
I dunno... to me, the old MFA Boston logo screams 1990's or maybe late 1980's, when Helvetica Condensed was everywhere. It's the bland, boring, generic of its time. It makes me thing of a boring field trip I'm being forced to go on.
While the new logo feels very 2020's. Like they're trying to be contemporary, and actually make an effort to connect the art they show to people today, not to those people's parents. It looks like a place with a thought-provoking exhibition I might want to take a date to.
I love that I can't tell if the Adobe sponsored content a couple of paragraphs in is an exhibit, or just coincidence, because it's a perfect example of the phenomenon.
I've noticed this loss of creativity and personality before. It's very noticeably in building architecture. Now it's taken over web architecture. All websites and logos starting to look the same-ish.
My bad take: Modern architecture ugliness comes from architects using CAD with insufficient proficiency to create complex designs. Result: Mossty cubes and grids, with some advanced users adding fillets.
Back in the 80's, my dad invested tons of money into a top of the line computer (a 386), plotter, software, and training, when CAD was first a thing.
He did one project with it and roundfiled the whole thing because there was no art involved. He had become an architect specializing in high end custom homes because of the creativity involved. CAD killed that aspect.
Just wait til the next generation come in, who've grown up designing widgetes for 3D printing. Weird procedural geometry, swoopy curves and crazy patterns galore! :D
Building architecture is subject to physics, building code laws, and big differences in cost (measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more).
I do not see why the same dynamics would apply to a logo/font, which surely have very little cost difference between any two.
The majority of designers use the same few software packages (a truism of most digital fields), with the same range of functions and parameters, the same trends, all reading the same internet articles, subscribed to the same creative influencers, and being churned out of the same college courses, where they all got taught out of the same text books.
I'll reply to my own [now un-editable] comment to add, by way of balance to that comments somewhat cynical take, that some of the ubiquitous tools and techniques I mentioned have enabled a great many people to participate in these activities, who might otherwise not. The pros and cons of that too are debatable, however I certainly think we can all see some positives in the principle of technology enabling people.
There's been much virtual ink and video play time discussing the phenomenon. Just do a search "why are designs so boring?"
My personal slant pins it on the cult of minimalism. I realized we were effed when Lufthansa went with their incredibly dull and depressing livery. Most people in the planespotting world disliked it (1), while designers were falling over themselves gushing about the elegance, clarity and simplicity of the brand (2). My UX designer even used them as an example to emulate (we disagreed on many things).
Also, designers, like most people, are inherently uncreative. A new trend will start, and people will follow. Just look at how every AI project has been trying to shoehorn "Q" into their names these past couple of weeks. Or how everything "smart" had to have a lower-case "i" in front of the brand for a long while. I'm starting to see the backlash against minimalism more frequently, hopefully it'll hit design schools soon and the next home run brand will move away from extremist minimalism
> Also, designers, like most people, are inherently uncreative
99% of the time the designer has to do what the client instructs them to do. And in most cases, they will simply point to some recent change by the competition.
Also everybody will have an opinion about a design.
That's way too hopeful. AI is not creative, it's a tool that gives you what it calculates to be the best solution which is taken from the space of all pre-existing solutions. So if anything it will double down on the lack of creativity and keep showing whatever worked before referring us down a cycle of dull, but very machine-predictable mediocrity.
AI is not the solution for making things more creative.
Neither are those designers. My point is, AI will make producing uncreative designs even cheaper, which in turn will make career in uncreative designs unprofitable, which means fewer uncreative designers.
It’s also way too hopeful to think that most people being made redundant by AI will suddenly discover something else they’re talented at (and not disrupted by AI nor the sudden influx of competition) and live merrily ever after.
AI will need to get much better, unfortunately, for that to happen. And AI will trigger even more minimalism in the short run.
This is because minimalism encourages extremely precise, exact abstracted designs where a single pixel being wrong is visible. While generative AI always has, and will indefinitely, be best at a profusion of exuberant detail where errors or repetition are concealed by the density. You can generate great photographic images or montages right now with MJ or DALL-E 3, but you will struggle to get anything which is a crisp sharp vector. Even vector-generating services like Recraft.ai aren't that good. (Note also how long it took generative AI to be able to do pixel art. We were trivially generating photorealistic faces while pixel art GANs weren't working at all.)
So, as a reaction to generative AI, designers & fashion will flee to minimalism in order to not look 'cheap'.
The vector art & typography will be a proof-of-work that a human made it and a costly signal of 'quality'. While anything photographic or painting-like, especially if presented as a single large raster image, will increasingly feel untrustworthy, cheap, and mass-produced.
Some of the AI art I've been browsing is far better than many human artists could create, it totally lacks the blandness and dumb trend-following of human creators.
commercial design needs to hit a set of 2 contradictory goals:
1) be as boring as possible so people can make sense of it quickly and efficiently in a world where there are countless other things competing for your time and attention
2) standout as much as possible to gain your attention in the aforementioned busy world
IME this explains a lot the nature of trends that design experiences.
In a way, it reminds me of flag designs. You can be creative with minimal color choice and patterns (Arizona), or you can be a riot of pattern and color (Maryland). Just don't be the same as everyone else (seal on blue field).
Reason I bring this up is the Southwest flag livery - which the MD one in particular really stands out.
I just don't get why companies change their branding every 5 minutes.
What do you gain? Did everyone suddenly start thinking Google was new and fresh after they spent however many millions on their rebrand? And then there's the inherent contradiction. Is a logo important, if not why are you changing it, if it is, why are you throwing out the current valuable logo, or are you implicitly accepting you somehow failed and tainted the old logo?
All I see is a company bike shedding rather than spending the money and effort to improve their offering.
I was employee No.3 in a start-up a long time ago.
When the founders & senior management started
spending time redesigning the (perfectly fine) logo,
I knew it was the beginning of the end.
I began to look for an escape route to another role.
It took 3 months for the logo to launch.
I was ready. I left.
They cashed out my Angel options at the Series B price.
It crashed and burned about 1 year later.
I still believe I was the only person to make money from that startup
Further, why should a logo even be fashionable? Sure if I get this week's fashionable hair cut it'll be out of fashion next week. So why get the fashionable haircut to start with.
To extend this further, presumably tech companies want to communicate that they are ahead of everyone else. If so why are they following the fashion. If you change your logo to be fashionable today, your communicating that you're a follower, not a leader.
All companies make grand statements about what logos are supposed to do and represent, but then they change the logo, which you can't really infer anything good from if you take those statements at face value.
Why do people fall in love? It's just human psychology.
> Further, why should a logo even be fashionable?
Because it's aesthetic, and aesthetics follow fashion. Again, it's just human psychology. It's what people like.
> Sure if I get this week's fashionable hair cut it'll be out of fashion next week.
The fashions we're talking about last for years, not days. Think 70's hairstyles vs. 80's hairstyles. You'd keep your hairstyle for many years, same as a logo lasts for many years.
> So why get the fashionable haircut to start with.
So you look good and have aesthetic appeal. So people want to date you, and in the business analogy, people want to buy your products.
> To extend this further, presumably tech companies want to communicate that they are ahead of everyone else.
No, they want to communicate that they're up-to-date and the right solution for you.
> If so why are they following the fashion.
Because that shows they're up-to-date.
> If you change your logo to be fashionable today, your communicating that you're a follower, not a leader.
Who said anything about being a leader? Yes, of course you want to follow the fashion. That shows you're up-to-date. The question isn't about being a follower vs. a leader, the question is about being up-to-date vs. being out-of-date. Being out-of-date is a bad look for any company. You want to be up-to-date.
> All companies make grand statements about what logos are supposed to do and represent, but then they change the logo, which you can't really infer anything good from if you take those statements at face value.
Sometimes the new logo is a new way of representing the "grand statements" but simply updated for the current fashion, reflected in the current design language. So you absolutely can infer that they're staying true to their values.
On the other hand, sometimes company values and priorities and "grand statements" change, because the older ones aren't right anymore. In which case a new logo can reflect those changes too.
In both cases, what you can infer is going to be valuable if they did a good job with the logo.
I think the generic answer is trend and fashion, mixed with fear of failure. If you do it like/similar to everyone else, you won't get the blame.
If the company/brand fails, everyone is going to put the blame on someone else. Yeah, the designer did this strange thing and it totally tanked the brand.
The design cycle is especially obvious in the case of Airbnb et al.: they all went from having cursive logo fonts to sans-serif.
In other words: the only thing that’s new with the current cycle is that it’s a minimal cycle, making a lot of designs converge. I’m sure we’ll see a larger variety of designs with the next cycle, underlying design philosophy permitting.
I wonder if it's to do with fixed-width serif fonts looking "old" due to their association with old text printers? Now sans-serif looks 'new' by comparison. Couple that with the 'clean sleek minimalist' look that all the modern tech companies have popularized and everything's re-converged on another round of samey looks. We're ripe for another new wave any year now. What'll it be this time? Comic sans? sARcAsTiC?
That might be some of it, but I think there are even more quotidian answers: large companies often have fixed design budgets (by virtue of having a design staff sitting around, waiting for things to do) and are generally under pressure from investors, etc. to demonstrate market fit and relevance.
In other words: "what are you paying all these designers for, if you aren't going to have them match the latest trends?"
I'll tell you exactly why: because graphic design, which used to be about concept and humanity and risk-taking, has been transformed into a darkpattern-loving exploitative commodity in which no truly creative person wants to live.
The most ironic thing of all is that the author of this article has built a platform – one of many – that has sucked all deliberation and concept and creativity out of the branding process.
Funny, I'm the opposite. The old logos look fuddy-duddy, like stuff that my grandmother would have loved.
The new logos make me think -- oh, maybe they're actually doing something cool and relevant today, and not stuck in outdated ideas of luxury that include full sets of china and silver and mink coats.
I had the same reaction as you, but the point makes a lot of sense to me after some consideration. If I cover up the new ones, I can TOTALLY see how someone could associate the old ones with values and styles they find outdated. At an extreme, if I imagine asking my 16yo niece about the old logos, I wouldn't be at all surprised by a highly negative association with the old.
Yes exactly. They look like they're for grandma and will go with her pearls. And a Rolls-Royce.
I don't see what's so "lost" about that. It's certainly not the type of luxury vibe that seems to speak to anything desirable today. The logos look like something out of a museum.
Before: let's commission a designer to make a cool logo / let's make a cool logo.
Now: market research data indicates that 90% of sales went to people who used this font style in their logo so let's commission a designer to make us a logo that looks like everyone else's [1]
[1] with no consideration of the fact that 99% of sellers use that font type in their logo and 85% sales went to market leader who definitely used that font type in their logo, to say nothing of the fact that the logo probably didn't secure the conversion in any cases
Forget the fonts. What's going on with Diane von Furstenburg rebranding to DIANE (invisible word) VON (linebreak) FURSTENBURG?
The original logo correctly reflects that von is not capitalized, that von is part of "von Furstenburg", and that there is no hidden word between "Diane" and "von Furstenburg". The new logo does none of those things. Who puts a caesura in the middle of a word?
I noticed this same risk-averse "generic" phenomenon about article bodies. I was trying to design a wordpress theme for my blog and I was googling some things and readings articles. I had multiple tabs open and while I was in the middle of an article I realized I couldn't even tell what website that article belonged to!
Every website was white with black text on it. Web "design" seemed limited to picking which color should links be. When you notice this, you start seeing it everywhere. Every article just looks exactly the same. They were all forgettable and devoid of personality. It seemed as if branding didn't reach the content of the article and was just a crown worn on top of the content, literally, at the header.
> It seemed as if branding didn't reach the content of the article
Good.
> They were all forgettable and devoid of personality
Are you similarly upset that books are so "devoid of personality"?
The work of a book designer differs essentially from that of a graphic artist. While the latter is constantly searching for new means of expression, driven at the very least by his desire for a "personal style", a book designer has to be the loyal and tactful servant of the written word. It is his job to create a manner of presentation whose form neither overshadows nor patronizes the content [... whereas] work of the graphic artist must correspond to the needs of the day and, other than in collections, seldom lives on for any length of time[...] The aim of the graphic artist is self-expression, while the responsible book designer, conscious of his obligation, divests himself of this ambition. Book design is no field for those who desire to mint the style of today or to create something. --Tschichold, on the form of the book
We should be so lucky if web designers grew up and subordinated their impulses—of imparting their (eventually unfashionable) "personal styles"—to their duty to serve the page and the content the way that it is done with books.
Not at all. Because there are many books with colorful designs and unique visual language. Any textbook or magazine you pick will have more visually interesting articles than webpages.
Icons inside programs too. Just this morning I got confused trying to un-mute myself inside Discord. Like at some point these braindead designers need to realize that an important part of "UX" is that users should easily be able to find what they're looking for and differentiate it from the next ugly white-on-grey icon that looks the same.
I’m in favor. More legible, easier and cheaper to reproduce, good rendering in small sizes. Brands need more differentiation when they’re new. Once they’re established, the name and the product stands for itself. I don’t get why people care so much about this. Do they also bother with people using t-shirts rather of suits? Simpler logos are more functional. Logos also don’t exist on a vacuum (like a JPEG in an article), they are accompanied with other elements of visual language. Hand picking some logos and putting them all together in order to make a statement about a perceived trend is artificial. There are much more fancy logos than simpler ones overall, so nowadays simpler stand out more. Also, there’s nuance in simple, it’s not just “sans serif”, there’s weight, spacing, contrast and proportion differences. A design must be evaluated in its own context and usage, unlike they do in these articles. I’ve lost count of these superficial attacks on “minimalism” which appear on the net. I bet not one of the designers responsible for such redesigns did that on basis of a trend, each project had a specific scope and rationale, but somehow people attack designers like they are all getting stupid, yeah, sure, random people on the internet must know better than designers evolving their craft and understanding for decades, working closely with clients to realize a comprehensive and carefully crafted vision.
To me, serif fonts convey a sense of the classic, and sans serif fonts convey moderness. So if the top people of a company says to designers "make the company more modern", it makes sense that one of the first things the designers will do is to change the serif logo to a sans serif one. It's not always a good decision though, some industries, like high fashion (as seen in the article) and literary (e.g. New Yorker, Littler Books) benefit from being "classy" and having a serif font.
Part of the original impetus is because the nice-looking classical logos, etc. were too high-resolution for low-definition display devices.
Then it became a game of pointy-headed middle-managers having meetings in the boardroom and micro-managing the creatives.. "our competitors wet their pants, so we have to as well in order to not appear behind the times.."
That's an inherent problem with the system.. even if something works and is comfortable for people to use and they're happy with it, you still have some middle-manager screaming at subject matter experts that they need to innovate because the system is based on creating artificial value for "the shareholders". So you end up with dubious changes like Google Maps recently deciding that they would change their colour palette to a "cold tone". Why? Did anyone ask for more blue and green and gray, or is this just more artificed "innovation for the shareholders"?
Oh dear. My eyes literally hurt while looking at it. Its like the text moves away from me, straight into the screen. It's not an animation right? I got astigmatism. Funny how the excuse is "More Accessible" ... but I guess the picture is the problem, not the font or the devil eyes on the logo.
Since its publication it even got featured in a Spanish textbook, and I get tons of traffic to it all the time. The topic seems very much valid for the last few years, with no sign of change.
The main reason seems to be to look good (or even readable) on mobile, but it seems that it's more of a bandwagon than a proven good strategy.
Personal experience: My portfolio site gets more views, engagement, comments, and interviews when it's in a sans-serif font. I've copied the same portfolio and designed it with serif fonts and it seems to be nowhere near as attractive as the sans-serif. All of the fonts were purchased from designer type foundries and are very readable and pleasing to the eye.
I much prefer the serif with warm colors for various elements. But the people I might work with strongly prefer the sans-serif with white and black and bold and bright accent colors.
Constraints of the medium (tools and materials used/context or environment operated in) can stifle new ideas and reward gradual changes, resulting in an eventual equilibrium of form.
Could that be homogenization caused by the rise of social media in the ~2010 timeframe? Where individuality is being eliminated by the stifling conformity of being constantly visible and everyone knowing your stuff? Things which used to be private and personal. And people are playing it safe by conforming to avoid being rejected by their peers. Thus creating a hive-mind which has spread to every aspect of life, including design and aesthetics?
The decline of the modern corporation in general, then? Just gets bogged down by bureaucracy and the marketing departments taking everything over? Or some similar malaise.
Playing devil’s advocate here: the message itself could be written in an easily legible font (plus an image, potentially), and the company logo could still be cursive or whatever, making it much more distinct. Once the logo shape is learned, it should be easy to recognize.
You could. But the theory is that you'd be communicating that you're old but reliable. The style for decades is also that you use serifs mostly for blocks of body copy and the old text heavy David Ogilvy ads would mostly not fly today.
I'm not sure 20th century typographic practice ever especially favored serifs for display (e.g. headline) use.
I thought the trend in fashion could be traced back to the rise of non Western customers. Many Chinese and Middle Eastern people can read Latin characters well, but it’s still easier in a cleaner font.
Sanding away character isn’t limited to typefaces. As we all seek to fit into a well defined and streamlined “likes” driven society do we not also sand away parts of our own character?
Discussion about fashion and trends aside, A lot of it driven by a desire to make the branding easy to reproduce across web formats. I wonder if that’s an indictment of the web…
partly its because it just doesnt matter EXACTLY what font. you might give Elon's rebranding of Twitter to the Unicode X glyph as a most famous recent exemplar application of this perspective -- plus it saves money on custom font crafting or analysis work.
two: there really are a certain set of traits an ideal font should have and only a subset of all possible fonts have them. so just pick one of them, dammit -- Janet! -- and move on.
What I appreciate in good design is not only looking good but standing out from the crowd. The problem with imitating others is that you end up looking like everything else. It's not offensive. But also not remarkable or memorable. A lot of web design suffers from being bland and generic.
A few years ago we had an app and our designer came up with an intense shade of red that was slightly pinkish. He then proceeded to use that for our app icon. Net result: it jumped out from all the other icons on the phones apps drawer. The whole app looked fantastic but that icon was awesome. You could not not notice it. Everybody else was using fashionable blues and greens that literally everybody uses.