I know it’s quite an insignificant bit of enshittification but I still feel a bit miffed that every logo these days looks the same.
Logos don’t need to be readable. Logos need to be instantly, and unmistakably recognizable. McDonald’s logo is the big yellow M. It’s not “readable”, because it’s not a word. But, the entire world instantly recognizes the logo, regardless of whether they can read English.
I agree with OP, they’re doing a disservice to themselves by simplifying their logos to plain text.
they’re doing a disservice to themselves by simplifying their logos to plain text.
It also dilutes their branding when translated into different languages/writing scripts.
That McDonald’s ‘M’ is instantly recognizable in every language, even languages that don’t use Latin-derived letters.
But if your logo is plain text, how do you translate it into Cyrillic or Kanji? You either have to develop a completely new logo for those regions (hurting your worldwide recognizability) or you just roll with the English logo and have to deal with most of the locals seeing it as completely unintelligible.
Logos don’t need to be readable.
Completely depends on the circumstance. Do logos of global icons like McDonald’s, Apple or Volkswagen’s need to be readable? No. Of course not because they’re everywhere. Does your local electrician’s logo need to be readable because it’s literally just their family name? Yes. Yes, it absolutely needs to be readable.
Pretty sure the definition of readable covers what you are saying. Things don’t have to be necessarily a word or legible to be readable.
For instance, if I put two railroad spikes together in a off set plus and ask a Christian, “Is this readable as a Christian symbol?” That would be acceptable.
Fashions are cyclical and ornamentation and busy-ness will become popular again someday.
I hope you’re right but I’m not sure it’s really as set in stone as you make it sound.
Its a pretty well documented phenomena
Generation A does something a certain way
Generation B rejects their parents’ taste, does the thing a different way
Generation C goes “there was some good stuff back in A’s day, maybe we shouldn’t write them off completely” and boom we’re wearing bell bottoms in the 90s
Why do we still have mom jeans then, no one looks good in them
We don’t still have mom jeans. We have mom jeans again, supporting OPs point.
They never went away though
They are called mom jeans because - because - until recently, and since the early nineties, only moms wore them. Not sure about you but where I come from, “mom” is not synonymous with fashionable.
Nothing goes away. Things go in and out of fashion and the zeitgeist - that’s really what is being discussed here.
I’m not sure it’s really applicable here. What I’m seeing in this picture is not an evolution from “Style A” to “Style B”, it’s more like an evolution from lots of diverse logos to a completely uniform design across the industry. It’s not an evolution from one style to another, but more like a consolidation from unique logos to sameness.
I have a hard time seeing them diversifying again. Maybe someone will change but then the others might just follow suite.
Until eventually enough execs get tired of it and demand busier logos because itll catch attention
busy-ness will become popular again someday.
I follow design trends and I’ve been told complexity and uniqueness will make a comeback for 5 years in a row. Will it come back someday? Sure but that day may be decades into the future for all I know. I believe it when I see it.
It’ll come back when people feel like being a little silly again. The state of the world right now is very unfun
Just wait until LLMs are used to design most of them - they will be distinctively average.
Every CEO of every one of these shit merchants signed off on millions of dollars of expenditures to implement these rebrandings after being sold the idea by bullshit merchants.
That’s why they deserve the big bucks I suppose.
That’s really what rankles the most.
These fuckers paid millions for some designer to come up with “let’s just type the name of the company in a super-boring font”.
in a super-boring font
And they probably also paid a type foundry a fuckload of money to create that super-boring font for their exclusive use.
after being sold the idea by bullshit merchants.
You’re giving media agencies too much credit. At some point many years ago simplicity and blandness became the thing every CEO was chasing after. Most designers are long ready to move on but board members and CEOs are too risk averse to try anything new. They all want what everyone else has.
They’re risk averse because the whole game is “get overpaid to run the business, then hire overpaid consultants to tell you how to run the business”, because (and this is my own insane thought) they’re trying to recreate a class of hereditary nobility which consists of those who lead because they are rich, and qualifications do not matter. It’s not just logos, it’s everything about such enterprises. These parasites are robbing both shareholders and workers. This is why the only two industries left in America are fraud and gambling.
That class already exists, it never stopped existing, they just stopped calling themselves monarchs (except for some that still call themselves that.)
I was giving the credit to the head of marketing ;-)
If I ever start a business, I’m hiring the Rockstar North artist who did all the fake business logos that look like dick and balls from GTA. Start selling actual Giggle Cream.
The Facebook one isn’t true, the one on the right was the logo of the company before it rebranded to Meta. The one for the social media platform still looks similar to the one on the left.
I think you’re missing the point.
There’s a logo and there’s the brand text. You posted the brand text. You didn’t post the logo.
It’s also, by definition, not enshitification.
These are logotypes, also known as wordmarks. That is a kind of logo. At least, that is what they are called by the graphic designers who create them.
Thanks. IMHO it makes sense for the word marks to become more legible. Logos should be the unique thing.
Uh okay, substitute “logo” with “brand text”, isn’t the point the same? There used to be a variety of designs and now it’s all the same and boring.
So the text is more legible and the logos are not boring.
That’s probably a good thing
We did bully Cracker Barrel to put the *ahem* white man back.
Cracker Barrel took the cracker and the barrel off of their sign. Didn’t make sense.
ORDER CRACKER BARGLE?
All of these corporations should be dismantled. And no, I couldn’t care less about their fucking logos.
They probably all have the same consultancy groups making the same decisions. How dare they not conform to the market or the competition and stand out.
This post seems extremely cherry picked to me. There are more than 20 brands. I picked 5 on my mind from tech: Logitech (stylized g still)
Framework (boring in roughly the same was as in the post; always has been?)
Anthropic (stylized A)
Amazon (still the smiling arrow)
Apple (still the prominent apple logo)
I don’t think this is a fad. And if it were a fad, it looks like intentional effort towards readability to me, which wouldn’t be enshittification imo.
Naturally, almost any time somebody claims to point out a trend they use a collection of cherry-picked examples.
This assumes the speaker is dishonest/motivated.
That’s true in a lot of spaces here. And it’s a bad thing. But it isn’t true everywhere or of everyone.
No need to assume anything, just look for yourself at the examples given with most claims. You’ll typically find one or maybe two solid ones, and a collection of much less impressive outliers added to bulk it up. A list of 5 reasons, even if 4 of them are weak, always seems to give an argument more weight than one reason. Cherry picking is totally normal. But what makes a claim really impressive is when you can go down their list of evidence and say yep, yep, yep… all good points. That’s the kind of thing that changes my mind.
Ah; I understand you. Descriptive, not a defense or a normative statement.
Apple? The one that had a very hand drawn logo for a while. Then a rainbow apple?
They’ve changed and simplified their logo lots.
From and to something very similar to today.
The logo is a way to present your brand. If the logo is bland, by extension you expect the brand to also be. And if the brand is expected to be bland, and if the company wants it and/or the profits still come, there is not reason forcing the company to try to be better.
Corporate logos undergo a vacillation between flat and aero every few decades. Just look at the Pepsi logo for example. Its part of the whole soulless pandering philosophy they have going on.
ah dude don’t get me started how all the logos on my apps now look the same. it’s at the point where I often don’t even bother searching for the icon anymore, because odds are even if I find it, they’ve changed it just enough to not be recognizable
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