Not sure about the logo, but I do know this two paragraph “article” is everything that’s wrong with modern journalism.
BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
101–110 of 193 posts
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#102BMW builds _cars_, not Apps. They pride themselves in craftsmanship. The Logo badge on the actual car is a three dimensional, physical thing. Instead of embracing that, they made it flat like an App icon. It will look shit on cars and it does not communicate that BMW builds _real machines_. Everybody is going crazy about going digital and they forget what they are good at and what the customer likes them for.
Commenters are saying BMW has stated clearly they will not use the new logo on their products (cars).
Everybody here is tripping for no reason.
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, they could have easily made the existing design flat[ter] but left the rest intact. the new look looks very cheap, but i bet they paid $200k for the redesign.
Remember the London Olympics logo? Something like $700k.
I had to look that up, that is awesome!
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#104> Sure, it looks nice on BMW’s bronze-hued electric i4 sedan concept, but what about on a white BMW? Or a letterhead? Or on a sign for a BMW dealership on a highway? Is the author really concerned that BMW's design team didn't think about how this logo would be used in such fundamental ways? I can guarantee you that they did. You can personally like or not like it, fine. But if you're going to write a judgey article…
Basic steps such as? There is not much available about it. Also, you think too highly of corporations. Companies literally have an intern change their logo for no reason, i’ve been that intern. There are dozens of levels of people more worried about saving face than anything else.
Basic steps such as reaching out to some people at BMW and asking them about it. Talking to other people who do similar sorts of design work and try to understand why choices would've been made. Ask someone who might actually know the specific constraints involved in this kind of design work and ask them to weigh in.
This article is just whining about something the author doesn't like. Which, it's fine not to like something. But not everything is designed for your eyes and your personal tastes only. So a design journalist should hold themselves to a higher standard and attempt to understand and illuminate rather than just point and sneer. (Which, I know: This article is just click-bait and not intended to be anything more than that. In which case: Why is it on Hacker News?)
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#105Change for the sake of change is how good apps and brands are ruined. >Jens Thiemer, senior vice president of customer and brand, says it was designed to “radiate more openness and clarity" Clearly a decision made by a non-technical person thinking with his heart and not his brain. How these people get away with such buzzword bullshit at huge multinational corporations is beyond me. I wonder how much he makes. Remind…
>> Reminds me of that infamous Pepsi PDF Holy shit, you weren't kidding, That was really something special https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_grav...
What... did I just read? It looks like something that was written by Einstein, under the influence of some incredibly potent drugs.
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#106What the hell... Yeah its flat but that's obviously not the problem, why would you eliminate the color black from your very famous blue black and white logo.
I agree. It seems like the obvious solution would have been to just remove the light gradient—and maybe the bevels.
Maybe they should have gone with a slight tweak of the 1963 version https://cdn.bmwblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/BMW_logo_... and scored retro-nostalgia points with the older crowd, too.
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#107It's occurred to me for some time now that design has suffered from globalization in that while surely there is some good in the more rapid exchange of ideas, there has also been this hyper convergence in design where it all just kind of looks the same. Consider that in this particular domain, automobiles, you used to be able to clearly delineate design along national lines. There was a clear distinction in Italian design vs American, German, British, Swedish etc. But now?
The thing that bothers me the most about this minimalist trend is how pervasive it is. I quite like minimalism myself, but I feel like 40 years ago even within minimalism you would have expected to see some difference in execution across the globe.
Which brings me to how trendy the design field is in general. I don't think I've seen a field so uniformly go from one trend to the other and then defend it with such dogged bullshit. Who in God's name is fooled by the poetry? You're using the same design language and aesthetic as everyone else, the only thing creative is the nonsense you're writing to defend it. Why is a field full of 'creatives' so uniform in thought and expression? How many trends have we witnessed so far in web/graphic design? We've built all these powerful creative tools just so they can end up all making logos that look exactly the fucking same. Surely machine learning models can create a good percentage of the design we see today.
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#108BMW builds _cars_, not Apps. They pride themselves in craftsmanship. The Logo badge on the actual car is a three dimensional, physical thing. Instead of embracing that, they made it flat like an App icon. It will look shit on cars and it does not communicate that BMW builds _real machines_. Everybody is going crazy about going digital and they forget what they are good at and what the customer likes them for.
> They pride themselves in craftsmanship. Used to. These days, not so much. And they're misfiring quite a bit. For example, the new X3 xDrive30e gets a measly 18 miles of electric range (EPA; real-world likely less). All of that added complexity and weight for very little benefit (in 2020 -- 10 years ago it would have been alright). No 3er manuals in the US anymore. Have you seen the rear of the new 3er which looks l…
> They had the right formula when the i3 originally came out
An overpriced design study with huge panel gaps everywhere?
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#109I really love flat designs and I'm a huge fan of this trend, but this logo looks so awful.
I'm really bad at design and this looks like a sketch made by me when I have an idea and I want it to show it to a designer.
Re: BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's the main problem. They got rid of black color ring surrounding the blue rotating propellers. That killed the logo.
It's actually a stylized Bavarian flag, the propeller story is a myth
The Bavarian flag is white-blue, BMW is blue-white ;)