Interesting logos are being replaced with boring ones

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/13/interesting-logos-are-being-re.html

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Try BOINGBOING

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Some consultant/focus group probably told them that millenials don’t respond to the old logos, for reasons.

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Hills and valleys. Brand identity is regularly refreshed by most companies. There are some that seem to never change but they do too eventually.

Additionally, the post title needs to be changed to: Boring old logos are being replaced with boring new logos.
The old ones aren’t interesting, the new ones are just more legible.

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Once we standardize on a single font we can all save a whole lot of money by licensing a single universal typeface.

But more seriously these changes to plainer appearance is always an expression of society’s uncertainty of the future. Hem lengths fall (I realize it’s mostly a myth), people follow fashion fads less closely, and more.

Society thinks a recession is probably coming.

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This is the danger of hot design trends. If you are on the forefront, it may make you look unique and modern. But after everyone gets on the band wagon, everyone looks the same and gets lots in the similar look.

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2018 has been a shit year for losing loved ones. Now I’ve lost my serifs too.

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There are some shop signs in swirly fonts that I can’t make out while driving by.

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Apparently Tech Giants are Killing Logos: "Blanding"

"Tech giants such as Apple, Google, Airbnb, and Uber communicate in basic codes that function almost like signage. They have intuitive branding; with simple visual cues, they are able to convey youth, friendliness, progress, newness, nowness, and, above all, tech. They have been wildly successful. And so their shared visual language has become a formula for countless tech hopefuls to copy.

Let us call them the blands.

Blands are like teenagers. They dress the same, talk the same, act the same. They don’t have a defined sense of self or, if they do, they lack the confidence to be it. It’s a school-of-fish mentality where the comfort and safety of the familiar outweigh the risk of attracting too much attention."

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I was especially surprised by the Burberry and YSL logos. The clean, thin serifs are so much a part of their brand style that I think it was a huge mistake to go for generic looking sans serifs.

There’s a weird trend right now of ‘simplifying’ logos into more-readable but more-boring versions with less flavor and less individuality. I was kind of shocked to see the new Lord & Taylor logo, which dumps a 190-year-old wordmark and replaces it with something that looks like an intern wrote it with a sharpie on lunch break.

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From the referenced article above:

“Perhaps it is unsuprising, then, that the blanding trend isn’t limited to tech. Even some of today’s most established brands have erased their identity and, in one turquoise swoop, neutered their brand. Take Peter Saville’s controversial redesign of Burberry’s wordmark. The radical use of a neutral type eliminated all decorative elements. In Burberry’s case, these details weren’t superfluous; they happened to evoke style and class and heritage and something nobody else had—something that was, for lack of a better word, Burberry. Celine, too, went minimal recently, killing its accent and adjusting the spacing of its wordmark to “enable a simplified and more balanced proportion” that is designed to read as well on Instagram as it does on the side of a building. Blanding, the suggestion seems to be, is just good business.”

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It just needs a giant heart around it and the word “4EVR” underneath.

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Next hot colour for logos: beige.

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Peter freakin’ Saville did that? I love his work, but there’s more to designing a wordmark than typing their name in Gotham.

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If they stick with lifting design cues from the web, they’ll be going with grey on grey or grey on white.

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I’m guessing that if a company is blanding their logo it’s because they are letting Omnichanneling beat them into submission. Try harder.

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melusine1

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Gross, gross gross! Ew!

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This screenshot I took in the main page’s grid mode might indicate one reason they’d make these changes: readability on small screens.
48%20AM

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