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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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 irony? Avoiding risk is itself a risk. The higher your chance of failure, the more significant this risk (from self-commodit-izing).
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
Add it to the many things that made it from the necessary to the aesthetic.
https://daniel.do/article/making-noisy-svgs/ (I link to the second post in the first paragraph)
Or someone on a 1336x720 Chromebook.
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.
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?
MPlus: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#mplus
Iosevka: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#iosevka
Iosevka has a few serif-like features that distinguish it from MPlus, and on the hidpi screens I use, it's easier on my aging eyesight.
As a UX designer I hate this but that’s the reality of why every site has the same boring flat design.
Before: https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/6a356...
After: https://creativereview.imgix.net/content/uploads/2022/09/MFA...
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
Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20210126132351/https://bostonath...
After: https://bostonathenaeum.org/
Can put this under the dictionary definition of insanity. Or someone needed justification to get paid without doing any real work.
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.
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.
Wow, now it looks like a logo for a contruction company or something, in cheap suburban billboards...
"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 …"
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.
So I'm definitely going with the new logo.
https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/
You have to subscribe to read the articles now, but just looking at the thumbnails is fun enough
Browsing the before&after tag was especially enjoying: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/categor...
I found a nice counter example to the trend presented in the article: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...
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.
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.
Dead Comment
I do not see why the same dynamics would apply to a logo/font, which surely have very little cost difference between any two.
Deleted Comment
It's increased homogenisation at every level.
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
(1) https://thepointsguy.com/2018/02/lufthansa-new-livery-boring...
(2) https://www.adelahaye.com/blog/2020/2/11/feeling-blue-luftha...
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.
AI is not the solution for making things more creative.
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.
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.
Reason I bring this up is the Southwest flag livery - which the MD one in particular really stands out.