Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

It's interesting to see the discussion unfold.

I used to do a lot of logo design, some for the replacement of time-honored logos even. Spicy jobs those were, both on pro and con sides!

One thing I learned was that new, individual, and fresh leadership psychology often brings new logos into being. Differentials in psychology can't help but expose new perspectives on organizational concepts. And that's what a logo is, a conceptual organization pointing to a new or updated organizational concept! :-)

Some of those fresh perspectives are normal elsewhere, but have been ignored in a given organization for so long that they seem prophetic when a leader considers them. And so sometimes even the doomed new logos I saw developed were like prophets sent from on high. They might not have been well-loved, they might not have lasted 5 years, but they meant something, and it was often a big something.

In my experience, when the new Director of Whatever deemed that the amazing old woodcut logo had to go, it wasn't usually that this individual hated history and tradition. It was their expression of an obvious need for a new concept.

To the outside world, the need for radical change is not always as obvious as it is to even just a small set of insiders, people who have developed what you might call "woodcut PTSD," along with some damn good ideas for how the org needs to change, and soon.

So, to me--no opinion on the graphical look, since it's often a red herring in a bunch of ways. But some big "!" interest in the individuals and perspectives behind the scenes, due to the nature of the change.

(Also, seeing people redesigning the new logo to much applause is kind of a cringe. Again a big risk here is that they are unwittingly reconnecting a really unhealthy feedback loop, based on assumptions from an outsider's perspective/demand on the organization.)

Who cares? It says Oxford University Press which is the important part. The little image above it is just fluff and literally doesn't matter. I certainly wouldn't call it 'unfathomably bad' considering it's not a child's drawing or a some obscene gesture.

> One thing I learned was that new, individual, and fresh leadership psychology often brings new logos into being

Could it be that new leaders feel they have to demonstrate they're in change, and initiating a logo replacement is unfortunately much easier than doing something that is genuinely positive for stakeholders and shareholders?

It's probably good for a few seconds of confusion on the part of people who see the logo and don't recognize it because it looks like a zillion other logos and has no continuity with the old logo.

So no big deal.

Although. There is Steve Jobs line. Where's he's trying to get engineers on the original Mac to eek out just a slight faster boot. We're going to sell 100 million of these things, can you make it boot 25 seconds faster? If you do that will save cumulatively 90 years worth of time. That's a human life. Can you save a human life!

I mean it's dumb and maybe funny but a minor annoyance over a long enough time and enough people could be worth complaining about.

I am trying to to think of a single rebrand / new logo / new icon that I actually liked at the time—that didn't seem to signal a degradation in the integrity, quality or trustworthiness of the entity represented.

(There are some cases where the new brand has grown on me, to the point that I have come to prefer it to the old one. The most recent examples I can think of are the 1999 rebrand of Northern Electric as Nortel Networks—I do still love that globemark!—and the 2015 sans-serif Google logo which has become so ubiquitous as to make the previous serif version look weirdly quaint. But I liked neither of those at the time they were unveiled.)

Am I just a stick in the mud? Can you point out some rebrands that have been so wildly popular that I might begrudgingly admit that I actually liked them?