(disclaimer: lead brand manager, been at the table of a lot of the meetings where these logo changes happen.)
There's a few different reasons (especially depending on the company) why that these happen, but I personally think it boils down to two unintuitive quasi-psychological reasons.
- When suits are fumbling around looking for a new shiny project that'll give them a sense of "legacy" and their fingerpints all over (that won't affect immediate profits), somewhere in marketing and brand is usually the first place they'll grab. If wins, fantastic, they've secured their legacy both in a career-spanning sense and at the company itself with a bonus. If it fails disastrously, easy enough to quietly switch back to the old and to save face by tackling a different project.
- Sort of relatedly, a lot of marketing suits hate feeling "left out" of trends; it's something I loathe about the industry, the hyper-focus and optimization of being at the crest of new trends (when arguably they're usually shittier than the previous ones). Oftentimes their entire salary / sense of purpose of being at the job is tied into with presenting the latest and greatest, and insecure designers will be too happy to be enablers.
(My opinion may be a minority of the industry itself as if it were me, we'd be back to 90's era logos for the sheer zany quality.)
The sad part is, I have literally lost brands. Just entirely been unsure what I used to buy, because I buy based upon look, not just on product name.
EG, I buy battered fish in a blue box, the box disappeared from my main grocery store. When I went to my less visited store, it was gone there too. Literally, I just picked a random replacement brand.
Another thing which gets me, is marketers think everyone buys things weekly. And I once noticed a product I was hunting for with "New look!" on the box, but if was the last of the "New look!" boxes, the ones behind tem were missing the pronouncement.
I'm buying fish sticks here, and I do so once every 6 months, and throw a bunch of boxes in my deep freeze.
I'm not tied into what "exciting change" some yahoo thinks their product is going through, nothing is exciting about the food I buy, I just want fish sticks.
The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish.
UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.
Oh, and don't get me started on flavour or product change.
I don't want "new and improved". Stop it! Leave my tasty thing alone. The number of times I've changed brands, and never gone back, because "improved"...
And the worst, I buy frozen pizza. Unlike my fellow shoppers, I buy for the best crust flavour, and only meat.
Why?
Because if you want good frozen pizza, buy great crust, meat only, the put fresh veggies on it! Meat freezes well, not so much veggies.
Lately, one brand has added "croissant crust" and also "cheese in crust", and unless a supermarket is the size of all creation, it doesn't have room for one brand with 8 types, by 3 styles.
The result? The best crust, without extra calories(cheese), is now impossible to find.
My local grocery store recently redesigned their milk packages. Before the change the two variants were white and blue respectively. Now they are blue and white. They literally switched the colors after (iirc) 15+ years of the same consistent colorscheme. I'm still puzzled by that move.
> The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish.
See this comes down to simple maths though. If you can retain enough of the loyal customers and win some news ones with the "exciting change", the net difference is worth it.
This keeps happening so I guess the maths checks out.
> UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.
Many modern UI "designers" are certainly not worth of that name, in that they change things not according to systematic study and observation, but only due to their own hunches and personal preferences.
> I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish
This is too much even. Of course it's better if the taste doesn't change. But there is a huge I've already bought this before in my buying patterns. Unless something becomes unserviceable I'll probably keep buying it.
This is the right answer. Empirically, continuity of brand assets actually drives higher brand recognition and awareness/shoppability advantage over time, particularly for consumer goods. Look through the disastrous Tropicana branding change example for how wrong can changing familiar assets go.
However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do - after
all each consumer see a big brand in a branding context maybe half a dozen to a dozen times a month for a few seconds at a time in advertising or stores. The marketing teams see it every day every hour :-)
So they naturally desire for change - exacerbated by the fact that the "experts" in marketing agencies or relevant in house functions have no incentive to tell them different as they make money off of the change :-)
>However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do
Maybe the marketing teams from 12 big non-competing companies can "rotate" and do the work for a new company every month, coming back "home" once a year. Keep the eyes fresh.
At this forum some like to ironically refer to things like "frontend framework of the month", meaning novelty that brings no discernible benefits at best.
It is absolutely disgusting how much gets done in this world simply because someone needed to stroke their ego. Legacies, bonuses... pah. Pathetic how predictably selfish we humans really are.
What really strikes me is the lack of customer centricity in all this. Do they want the change? Do they think the existing look is outdated? Do they like the old look? Pah. Who cares! I have a legacy to cement and a bonus to secure!
(Besides the usual MBA word-vomit mumbo jumbo like 'modern utility', but we all know those are just made up excuses)
Maybe a brand should just be... a brand. A brand isn't your friend, it isn't human, it isn't alive, and it most certainly only exists to take your money and put it in their account -- and, in tech, more often than not through some rent-seeking subscription model because nobody likes us actually owning anything anymore.
It isn't just the logos that change the same companies have diversity officers as if this will change the tast of the orange juice. As is customary I have to add I am a black male least I am accused of being insensitive.
Cynical Geezer Take: It is very consumer-centric. Brand A's management is loudly signaling that Things Have Changed, at what was a familiar & perhaps favored company. So I need to be alert for price hikes, product shrinks, quality & service downgrades, etc., etc. Or, if there is a Brand B that I like almost as well - then this is probably a great time to switch to it. Unless Brand A's product was extremely fungible & competitive (say, gasoline), then switching to B before A's sh*t hits the fan will involve a lot less time & grief than sticking around after A has served notice.
Imho when a company gets penalized by watchdogs, it should also affect the logo, so customers can see that something happened. E.g. a watchdog could take a bite out of a logo or place an ugly watchdog symbol next to it.
It is confusing to me: a brand at its very core is ego and legacy. That ego and legacy happen to be shared among a whole company, but it’s 100% a “we vs the others”, and the history behind the identity.
What you seem to be looking for is not a brand but a label or a certification perhaps ?
It's also fun, easy and exceptionally easy to spend a precise budgetary on a branding exercise.
Marketing these days is full of technical details. Digital campaign statistics. CRM. Automation. Tiny optimisations, analytics and such.
Branding lets everyone be involved. Everyone can have a say. A logo change rarely succeeds or fails. You don't have to know anything to make decisions or sound smart. Everyone notices it. Crusty old board members notice, and might comment on the work. Etc.
It's high visibility, low effort, low stress, low bar work.
I'm not implying that great branding doesn't exist. Most of the examples here though... they just changed fonts to whatever is most fashionable now.
The most perfect example of this was when Marissa Meyer took over as CEO of Yahoo and "rolled up her sleeves" and worked with a few designers over a weekend to create a new Yahoo logo. It turned out the new logo was the old one, without serifs and more rounded and uniform.
If the cost of that redesign was a few people for a weekend, that had to be seen as a smashing success. It's the years long process to remove serifs that are bonkers.
I think Coca-Cola is a funny example here. They have had the same logo for over 100 years now, and people identify Coca-Cola with that serif logo. It seems like things are working great for them financially. So yeah I don't know how meaningful changing logos really is.
While I totally agree that logos tend to be changed far too early and too often, at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving.
For example, the quirky eBay logo was a great fit for a startup during the dot com boom, but the way typical websites look changed dramatically since then and the company became much bigger and professional.
At some point, a logo that doesn't get updated does start screaming "this is a company stuck in a time several decades ago".
Ex typographer and logo designer here (I didn't work in that profession since 25years but I know a bit a about it).
> [...] at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving.
This is simply not true. If your logo looks outdated, 10 years in, it was never a good logo to start with.
Logos need to be timeless.
They also need to to be recognizable though.
These are difficult to align constraints and only a tiny fraction of logo designers manage to produce logos that satisfy both.
Otherwise I agree 100% with parent. Suits meddling in affairs they have no clue of. Been there and seen that at two companies with previously good logos.
If your competitor starts diluting your brand mimicking your package with a cheaper replacement with the same colors, you need to offer some different to keep the brand alive. Had seen that before in milk packages (with a successful defense changing the lid shape)
> (disclaimer: lead brand manager, been at the table of a lot of the meetings where these logo changes happen.)
This is not a disclaimer. This is, in fact, the opposite of a disclaimer. It is a "claimer", if you will, claiming experience and authority on the topic.
A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut."
> A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut."
I believe the word you both are looking for is "disclosure":
This probably is the reason for why they go down the path of changing the logos.
But why they look similar is because, in the past logo drafts used to be hand-drawn by artists and now its being done by digital artists who first start with available library of fonts.
Another important point not mentioned yet: Rebrands are rarely done internally.
Companies hire external brand design agencies, and they tend to hire a few of the same well-known ones, which also set the trends for the rest of the industry.
I know people like to say "it was better in the old days" and wax nostalgic, but a lot of the logos in the before section were designed when digital tools were the norm.
Even with digital tools, many designers will still sketch them out.
The logo designs here are simply following what's on trend, rather than a reflection of tooling changes.
Hand drawing could be in effect for logos that haven’t been redesigned in centuries.
But there’s no way the first and subsequent Revolut logos have been influenced by radical tool changes. The same would go for Spotify or Yahoo, or airbnb.
Also a company requesting a whimsical logo would have no difficulty having it hand drawn if it fit the bill. There’s just way less demand for that, we’d need to look at “natural” adjacent businesses to get that vibe (e.g. https://naturalhihoney.com/ ), or restaurants.
I work in the UX space. My team presents new designs and features to customers before building them. We actually sit 1 on 1 with a customer and show them mockups and such of some future idea for the product. One of the questions asked to customers is something to the effect of, "Looking at design A, would you say it looks more or less 'modern' than design B?" This is usually the justification higher ups use for making these changes. I'm not saying this is a good way of product direction (do customers really know what they want?) but this is usually how the justification happens.
Generally there is design language for every decade or more. Not following this unless it is sufficiently old or well established just looks dated in a wrong way.
> Sort of relatedly, a lot of marketing suits hate feeling "left out" of trends;
Oh yeah definitely related, it's an existential crisis for marketing/media to not be producing something new. To be fair to them, software developers are worse I feel.
If these industries were pragmatic, there'd be far less work to do. Instead, we re-brand/re-build every year, lest we all lose our purpose and our jobs.
It’s funny how it’s the “suits” that are the money burners and productivity destroyers. While individual contributors are left to obsess about productivity. A sign that we all can afford to collectively slow down.
This answer agrees with my experience. Business people want to redesign sites, logos, etc. because it gives them something to do, gives them something to report and show to their higher ups, makes them feel useful, allows them to expense field “research” trips, allows them to expense offsite meetings with design consultants, allows them to do something fun instead of focusing on their real, but harder, business priorities, etc.
The article is confused about the difference between a logo and a word mark, which is what they are showing. Big brands are super pedantic about how and where logo marks and word marks are used. You shouldn't be seeing these word marks in contexts that are not already dripping in branding for the company.
Look at the Pinterest Brand guidelines (https://business.pinterest.com/en-au/brand-guidelines/) and you well find them saying: "Only use the Pinterest badge (please don’t use our word mark)". The Pinterest badge is the exact same stylised letter P from the old wordmark. So, almost everywhere you encounter a Pinterest logo it will be the stylised graphic. They can do that because enough people recognise the brand that they can drop the "interest".
The Facebook logo is an even weirder example because they are comparing the old Facebook app word mark with the newer Facebook-the-company word mark. That logo was specifically designed to look different from the app. Now that Facebook is now Meta, that uppercase logo has been retired.
Microsoft, Facebook, Pinterest, Spotify and Airbnb all have stylised logo marks. eBay and Google use word marks, but are brightly coloured and immediately recognisable 99% of the time they are seen.
Also in the age of social media, visual identity is less about the wordmark. For most of these companies, their word mark doesn’t even show up on their social media feeds. Most have guidelines that often include a custom typeface, specific types of photography, editorial layouts, illustrations that define the brand.
100% agree - It's not entirely suprising that when you remove the logos from a logo, along with initially the colour, they look similar.
I bet that those fashion companies have a decent idea of what they are doing in terms of branding and design though, and are making these decisions consciously and intentionally.
These are just the word marks, not the full logos.
I mocked up a comparison of the logos (Microsoft/Airbnb/Spotify/Pinterest rarely use their word marks without the accompanying icon) and they start to retain a _little_ more personality, at least for the tech comparison.
It still seems fair to say they're more bland than past iterations, though. The theme is ”[optional icon] + sans serif word mark”, and it's a good example of “small m minimalism” — a kind of unthinking collective march toward an absence of detail — touched on by The Cultural Tutor in this thread:
Architecture is a wierd one to pick on because it has function and form.
For instance, the gothic cathedral doesn't actually need those two giant pillars out front, it is held up by it's cantilever. So we removed those.
Also... Anyone else think it's very dark in here? How about we change out the engraved walls for windows?
All this thick concrete and engravments don't allow us to build bigger than 8 stories. How about we change it out to a steel internal design and add more windows. It will allow more light, decrease weight and allow us to build higher.
> Absolute neutrality. No detail. No identity.
> What does that say about us?
I disagree entirely with the basis of your argument. The amount of art in TV, Movies, Video games and overall graphic design has been on an incredible trajectory.
What happened is that we started to understand our goals and mission. Adding two $400k gothic style pillars to the facade of a building that do absolutely nothing for thee structural soundness, or spend that 400k to add a bit more elegance to the rooms?
You're right that there are still thousands of examples of objects with identity and personality in all forms of modern art and design.
You're also right that modern design and architecture are shaped by changing missions, goals and standards (as well as changing fashions, material science, economic concerns, and maintenance and energy considerations since the 16th Century).
I don't think that was the twitter author's point, though. (I was quoting the author in the parent — it wasn't “my argument”.) They didn't say, “we should over-engineer structures even though material science has improved to the point that we no longer need to” or, “we should embellish things excessively even if the budget might be better allocated elsewhere”. They simply claimed that detail is linked to identity and personality; when there is less diverse detail in modern design there will be less diverse identity and personality.
This seems fair to me and it's easy to corroborate. Popular logos have converged around inoffensive icon + sans-serif font. New buildings are typically homogeneous unadorned concrete/steel boxes or glass towers or some mix of both. Popular hardware has converged toward a minimal glass slab. Sales websites feel like cookie-cutter versions of each other. These objects can all still be beautiful, but they can also lack personality.
The subtext in the author's thread was that it doesn't need to be this way. It is possible to meet modern goals and standards and also design to a budget, but be braver (the active, big-M Minimalism rather than the more cowardly small-m version). You can build “minimal” things that have details, identities and personalities. For example, Teenage Engineering[1] and Zaha Hadid's architectural firm[2] both inject their designs with detail and personality while following a minimalist/modernist style. This elevates them from the glass slab/box world of some of their peers, and it makes the products and environments more interesting to use and live in.
I don’t think that trade-off is real - can’t think of a single classical, beautiful building I’ve been to where the interior would benefit that much from a flat glass facade. In fact what comes to mind is Penn Station as a counter-example. Do you have any examples?
IMHO the simplest explanation is that style is cyclical, and we've entered into a minimalist, almost brutalist, period and these brands are simply skating to where the puck is.
Will this design trend last? Probably not but doing a rebrand to freshen things up every few years is cheap enough, while the value in being "current" is very much worth it.
A lot of those logos looked old fashioned and almost early 2000s in comparison, which tech forward folks probably don't care about, but it's subtly picked up by the average consumer.
You'll notice this even for companies that haven't changed their brand in ages like Apple. All of Apple's branding and presentation style has changed in similar ways over the past few years.
The trick is to look quaint without looking old-fashioned. Few can pull it off. Maybe the Ferrari logo has this quality.
Even better it is to look timeless; maybe the Mercedes Benz logo has this quality. These are really really few: say, Apple had to rework their iconic bitten apple logo.
Agree. They all look more modern in the new versions. It’s just a natural cycle of design, look at the history of logos for longer lived brands and you see the same thing.
It's the "tyranny of the minimalist" in my opinion. And it's not just fonts - it's app design, housing and architecture, retail, etc. The sterile, uncluttered-to-the-max ethos has simply infected all aspects of design, even to the point of obvious negative impacts on usability. Not sure if I'd say "Apple started it", but they were certainly on the forefront.
I read an article recently (think it was on HN) about how, not too long ago, wealth and status was displayed with impossibly intricate designs - think the Belle Époque or Victorian designs. Now it's all expanses of black and white. I joke if I see another black-and-white "modern farmhouse" go up in my town I may just throw up on their driveway.
Pulling off minimalist design well in the physical realm is surprisingly difficult and expensive and fragile and can be at least as demanding a display of wealth and craftsmanship as more intricate styles. If your materials aren't top quality... you can't just hide them with paint or ornamentation. If your smooth blank white walls aren't perfectly flat or if your product enclosure has some seams that aren't perfectly even or that sleek stainless steel street furniture gets a dent... it will be noticeable. If you need to use a screw or bolt... you can't disguise it with a rosette or something. That floating bathroom sink... needs special care taken to keep the plumbing parts underneath it hidden or looking presentable. The featureless glass cube... is a structural engineering and HVAC nightmare.
Now imagine your family insists the inside also has to look like a model home. So clean it looks like no one even lives in it. Then add young children. Then add rich, child-free friends. Then add shows and magazines about redecorating / 'rennovating' every six months. FML.
I think film and television has had an effect on people’s aesthetics, especially in the home. Set design is cheaper when there’s nothing in the house, nothing ornate. Large, spacious and uncluttered makes for an easier shoot to fit all the people in. Uncluttered also means each shoot of the same scene is consistent, and ensures the eye is focusing on the action rather than unimportant details.
All those fashion brands changed their logos around 2018, with the exception of YSL back in 2012.
In 2012, Hedi Slimane took over the helm of YSL, notorious for the minimalist brand change dropping the Yves from Saint Laurent, but also revitalizing the brand. In 2018, Hedi Slimane became C.D. Of Celine, which has always been touted for minimalism, and made the already minimalist brand even more minimalist by dropping the accented e. There is a mixture of independent fashion brands there, but the majority of the luxury fashion market has been bought up by LVMH and Kering.
Those parent companies create a network and platform where brands cross pollinate, in the same way YC serves as an exchange of ideas between SF style startups. In practice, this means pressuring subsidiaries to follow the model that has worked for other brands, within and outside the family. Checkout dietprada on Instagram where they call out plagiarism commonplace in the fashion industry.
My theory is that brand designers who work in tech are influenced by fashion and general product design, which follows apparel. First, trend-setting luxury brands have expanded ready to wear lines and more generally became more accessible, rather than something reserved for the ultra elite socialites. This means more exposure, familiarity. Second, designers make significantly more money than in decades prior. Following in the footsteps of Google, companies found that better design leads to more money. In prior decades, UI/UX designers didn’t exist. The profession matured relatively fast compared to the head start software engineering had. I remember the HCD ( human centered design ) department used to be really in the weeds about the science of ergonomics, and the role UI/UX barely existed. Then the other class of UI people in the early web were graphic designers. That or engineers with design sensibilities. With higher tech salaries, art and design schools have since pivoted towards these career placements. Meaning, there are now established design departments within tech companies, and these departments are comprised of people whose hobbies revolve around design and fashion. All of this creates a feedback loop where “good design” is based on its similarity to other good design. In the same way engineers didn’t get fired for electing IBM and frontend engineers picking React, designers, at least the ones in a megacorp, designers won’t get fired for electing Sans Serif.
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There's a few different reasons (especially depending on the company) why that these happen, but I personally think it boils down to two unintuitive quasi-psychological reasons.
- When suits are fumbling around looking for a new shiny project that'll give them a sense of "legacy" and their fingerpints all over (that won't affect immediate profits), somewhere in marketing and brand is usually the first place they'll grab. If wins, fantastic, they've secured their legacy both in a career-spanning sense and at the company itself with a bonus. If it fails disastrously, easy enough to quietly switch back to the old and to save face by tackling a different project.
- Sort of relatedly, a lot of marketing suits hate feeling "left out" of trends; it's something I loathe about the industry, the hyper-focus and optimization of being at the crest of new trends (when arguably they're usually shittier than the previous ones). Oftentimes their entire salary / sense of purpose of being at the job is tied into with presenting the latest and greatest, and insecure designers will be too happy to be enablers.
(My opinion may be a minority of the industry itself as if it were me, we'd be back to 90's era logos for the sheer zany quality.)
EG, I buy battered fish in a blue box, the box disappeared from my main grocery store. When I went to my less visited store, it was gone there too. Literally, I just picked a random replacement brand.
Another thing which gets me, is marketers think everyone buys things weekly. And I once noticed a product I was hunting for with "New look!" on the box, but if was the last of the "New look!" boxes, the ones behind tem were missing the pronouncement.
I'm buying fish sticks here, and I do so once every 6 months, and throw a bunch of boxes in my deep freeze.
I'm not tied into what "exciting change" some yahoo thinks their product is going through, nothing is exciting about the food I buy, I just want fish sticks.
The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish.
UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.
I don't want "new and improved". Stop it! Leave my tasty thing alone. The number of times I've changed brands, and never gone back, because "improved"...
And the worst, I buy frozen pizza. Unlike my fellow shoppers, I buy for the best crust flavour, and only meat.
Why?
Because if you want good frozen pizza, buy great crust, meat only, the put fresh veggies on it! Meat freezes well, not so much veggies.
Lately, one brand has added "croissant crust" and also "cheese in crust", and unless a supermarket is the size of all creation, it doesn't have room for one brand with 8 types, by 3 styles.
The result? The best crust, without extra calories(cheese), is now impossible to find.
I had to switch brands.
Just stop it ffs!
See this comes down to simple maths though. If you can retain enough of the loyal customers and win some news ones with the "exciting change", the net difference is worth it.
This keeps happening so I guess the maths checks out.
Many modern UI "designers" are certainly not worth of that name, in that they change things not according to systematic study and observation, but only due to their own hunches and personal preferences.
This is too much even. Of course it's better if the taste doesn't change. But there is a huge I've already bought this before in my buying patterns. Unless something becomes unserviceable I'll probably keep buying it.
However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do - after all each consumer see a big brand in a branding context maybe half a dozen to a dozen times a month for a few seconds at a time in advertising or stores. The marketing teams see it every day every hour :-)
So they naturally desire for change - exacerbated by the fact that the "experts" in marketing agencies or relevant in house functions have no incentive to tell them different as they make money off of the change :-)
Maybe the marketing teams from 12 big non-competing companies can "rotate" and do the work for a new company every month, coming back "home" once a year. Keep the eyes fresh.
Apparently marketing may have it worse.
Why?
What really strikes me is the lack of customer centricity in all this. Do they want the change? Do they think the existing look is outdated? Do they like the old look? Pah. Who cares! I have a legacy to cement and a bonus to secure!
(Besides the usual MBA word-vomit mumbo jumbo like 'modern utility', but we all know those are just made up excuses)
Maybe a brand should just be... a brand. A brand isn't your friend, it isn't human, it isn't alive, and it most certainly only exists to take your money and put it in their account -- and, in tech, more often than not through some rent-seeking subscription model because nobody likes us actually owning anything anymore.
What you seem to be looking for is not a brand but a label or a certification perhaps ?
Marketing these days is full of technical details. Digital campaign statistics. CRM. Automation. Tiny optimisations, analytics and such.
Branding lets everyone be involved. Everyone can have a say. A logo change rarely succeeds or fails. You don't have to know anything to make decisions or sound smart. Everyone notices it. Crusty old board members notice, and might comment on the work. Etc.
It's high visibility, low effort, low stress, low bar work.
I'm not implying that great branding doesn't exist. Most of the examples here though... they just changed fonts to whatever is most fashionable now.
For example, the quirky eBay logo was a great fit for a startup during the dot com boom, but the way typical websites look changed dramatically since then and the company became much bigger and professional.
At some point, a logo that doesn't get updated does start screaming "this is a company stuck in a time several decades ago".
> [...] at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving.
This is simply not true. If your logo looks outdated, 10 years in, it was never a good logo to start with.
Logos need to be timeless.
They also need to to be recognizable though.
These are difficult to align constraints and only a tiny fraction of logo designers manage to produce logos that satisfy both.
Otherwise I agree 100% with parent. Suits meddling in affairs they have no clue of. Been there and seen that at two companies with previously good logos.
If your competitor starts diluting your brand mimicking your package with a cheaper replacement with the same colors, you need to offer some different to keep the brand alive. Had seen that before in milk packages (with a successful defense changing the lid shape)
This is not a disclaimer. This is, in fact, the opposite of a disclaimer. It is a "claimer", if you will, claiming experience and authority on the topic.
A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut."
I believe the word you both are looking for is "disclosure":
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115850/disclaime...
But why they look similar is because, in the past logo drafts used to be hand-drawn by artists and now its being done by digital artists who first start with available library of fonts.
Companies hire external brand design agencies, and they tend to hire a few of the same well-known ones, which also set the trends for the rest of the industry.
- 72andsunny (Dropbox, Instagram, eBay)
- Moving Brands (Netflix, Asana, BBC, Eventbrite)
- Red Antler (Casper, Alto, etc)
Even with digital tools, many designers will still sketch them out.
The logo designs here are simply following what's on trend, rather than a reflection of tooling changes.
But there’s no way the first and subsequent Revolut logos have been influenced by radical tool changes. The same would go for Spotify or Yahoo, or airbnb.
Also a company requesting a whimsical logo would have no difficulty having it hand drawn if it fit the bill. There’s just way less demand for that, we’d need to look at “natural” adjacent businesses to get that vibe (e.g. https://naturalhihoney.com/ ), or restaurants.
https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...
Dropbox rebrand was panned as well. https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/11/dropbox-rebrand-logo-visua...
Oh yeah definitely related, it's an existential crisis for marketing/media to not be producing something new. To be fair to them, software developers are worse I feel.
If these industries were pragmatic, there'd be far less work to do. Instead, we re-brand/re-build every year, lest we all lose our purpose and our jobs.
How many working products haven't been rebuilt just to incorporate some tech du jour?
The fact that a good number of people gets fresh CVs in the process is never held against it.
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Changes make or should make the impression of progress.
Look at the Pinterest Brand guidelines (https://business.pinterest.com/en-au/brand-guidelines/) and you well find them saying: "Only use the Pinterest badge (please don’t use our word mark)". The Pinterest badge is the exact same stylised letter P from the old wordmark. So, almost everywhere you encounter a Pinterest logo it will be the stylised graphic. They can do that because enough people recognise the brand that they can drop the "interest".
The Facebook logo is an even weirder example because they are comparing the old Facebook app word mark with the newer Facebook-the-company word mark. That logo was specifically designed to look different from the app. Now that Facebook is now Meta, that uppercase logo has been retired.
Microsoft, Facebook, Pinterest, Spotify and Airbnb all have stylised logo marks. eBay and Google use word marks, but are brightly coloured and immediately recognisable 99% of the time they are seen.
https://imgur.com/a/v5yKD3o
They do retain more personality than when they're stripped down to their word marks, even if they still converge around a similar visual theme.
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I bet that those fashion companies have a decent idea of what they are doing in terms of branding and design though, and are making these decisions consciously and intentionally.
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I mocked up a comparison of the logos (Microsoft/Airbnb/Spotify/Pinterest rarely use their word marks without the accompanying icon) and they start to retain a _little_ more personality, at least for the tech comparison.
https://imgur.com/a/v5yKD3o
It still seems fair to say they're more bland than past iterations, though. The theme is ”[optional icon] + sans serif word mark”, and it's a good example of “small m minimalism” — a kind of unthinking collective march toward an absence of detail — touched on by The Cultural Tutor in this thread:
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1538211892707086338
> Perhaps minimalist design is so prevalent because we no longer have anything to say.
> You don't need me to explain what the Gothic cathedral says, for example.
> But the skyscraper? It doesn't say anything, really. It's just... there.
> And suddenly everything, everywhere starts to look the same.
> Absolute neutrality. No detail. No identity.
> What does that say about us?
For instance, the gothic cathedral doesn't actually need those two giant pillars out front, it is held up by it's cantilever. So we removed those.
Also... Anyone else think it's very dark in here? How about we change out the engraved walls for windows?
All this thick concrete and engravments don't allow us to build bigger than 8 stories. How about we change it out to a steel internal design and add more windows. It will allow more light, decrease weight and allow us to build higher.
> Absolute neutrality. No detail. No identity.
> What does that say about us?
I disagree entirely with the basis of your argument. The amount of art in TV, Movies, Video games and overall graphic design has been on an incredible trajectory.
What happened is that we started to understand our goals and mission. Adding two $400k gothic style pillars to the facade of a building that do absolutely nothing for thee structural soundness, or spend that 400k to add a bit more elegance to the rooms?
pretentious and ostentatious or functional?
You're also right that modern design and architecture are shaped by changing missions, goals and standards (as well as changing fashions, material science, economic concerns, and maintenance and energy considerations since the 16th Century).
I don't think that was the twitter author's point, though. (I was quoting the author in the parent — it wasn't “my argument”.) They didn't say, “we should over-engineer structures even though material science has improved to the point that we no longer need to” or, “we should embellish things excessively even if the budget might be better allocated elsewhere”. They simply claimed that detail is linked to identity and personality; when there is less diverse detail in modern design there will be less diverse identity and personality.
This seems fair to me and it's easy to corroborate. Popular logos have converged around inoffensive icon + sans-serif font. New buildings are typically homogeneous unadorned concrete/steel boxes or glass towers or some mix of both. Popular hardware has converged toward a minimal glass slab. Sales websites feel like cookie-cutter versions of each other. These objects can all still be beautiful, but they can also lack personality.
The subtext in the author's thread was that it doesn't need to be this way. It is possible to meet modern goals and standards and also design to a budget, but be braver (the active, big-M Minimalism rather than the more cowardly small-m version). You can build “minimal” things that have details, identities and personalities. For example, Teenage Engineering[1] and Zaha Hadid's architectural firm[2] both inject their designs with detail and personality while following a minimalist/modernist style. This elevates them from the glass slab/box world of some of their peers, and it makes the products and environments more interesting to use and live in.
[1]: https://teenage.engineering/
[2]: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/top-architects/a295-30-...
I don’t think that trade-off is real - can’t think of a single classical, beautiful building I’ve been to where the interior would benefit that much from a flat glass facade. In fact what comes to mind is Penn Station as a counter-example. Do you have any examples?
> And suddenly everything, everywhere starts to look the same.
these are nationalist dog whistles....
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Will this design trend last? Probably not but doing a rebrand to freshen things up every few years is cheap enough, while the value in being "current" is very much worth it.
A lot of those logos looked old fashioned and almost early 2000s in comparison, which tech forward folks probably don't care about, but it's subtly picked up by the average consumer.
You'll notice this even for companies that haven't changed their brand in ages like Apple. All of Apple's branding and presentation style has changed in similar ways over the past few years.
Even better it is to look timeless; maybe the Mercedes Benz logo has this quality. These are really really few: say, Apple had to rework their iconic bitten apple logo.
I read an article recently (think it was on HN) about how, not too long ago, wealth and status was displayed with impossibly intricate designs - think the Belle Époque or Victorian designs. Now it's all expanses of black and white. I joke if I see another black-and-white "modern farmhouse" go up in my town I may just throw up on their driveway.
Keeping up with the Joneses sucks.
This does not seem like a bad standard for a house to me.
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In 2012, Hedi Slimane took over the helm of YSL, notorious for the minimalist brand change dropping the Yves from Saint Laurent, but also revitalizing the brand. In 2018, Hedi Slimane became C.D. Of Celine, which has always been touted for minimalism, and made the already minimalist brand even more minimalist by dropping the accented e. There is a mixture of independent fashion brands there, but the majority of the luxury fashion market has been bought up by LVMH and Kering. Those parent companies create a network and platform where brands cross pollinate, in the same way YC serves as an exchange of ideas between SF style startups. In practice, this means pressuring subsidiaries to follow the model that has worked for other brands, within and outside the family. Checkout dietprada on Instagram where they call out plagiarism commonplace in the fashion industry.
My theory is that brand designers who work in tech are influenced by fashion and general product design, which follows apparel. First, trend-setting luxury brands have expanded ready to wear lines and more generally became more accessible, rather than something reserved for the ultra elite socialites. This means more exposure, familiarity. Second, designers make significantly more money than in decades prior. Following in the footsteps of Google, companies found that better design leads to more money. In prior decades, UI/UX designers didn’t exist. The profession matured relatively fast compared to the head start software engineering had. I remember the HCD ( human centered design ) department used to be really in the weeds about the science of ergonomics, and the role UI/UX barely existed. Then the other class of UI people in the early web were graphic designers. That or engineers with design sensibilities. With higher tech salaries, art and design schools have since pivoted towards these career placements. Meaning, there are now established design departments within tech companies, and these departments are comprised of people whose hobbies revolve around design and fashion. All of this creates a feedback loop where “good design” is based on its similarity to other good design. In the same way engineers didn’t get fired for electing IBM and frontend engineers picking React, designers, at least the ones in a megacorp, designers won’t get fired for electing Sans Serif.
I’d like to blame Hedi Slimane for all of this.
It’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in a better overview of this phenomenon.
- 1700s-style hairline serif fonts for fashion brands, attempting to give an aura of being an old established fashion house
- Fonts with a playful, often outlined style for Web 2.0 era companies, emphasizing the human element of users being contributors