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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.
In other words: the only thing that’s new with the current cycle is that it’s a minimal cycle, making a lot of designs converge. I’m sure we’ll see a larger variety of designs with the next cycle, underlying design philosophy permitting.
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...
https://www.creativebloq.com/news/logos-look-the-same
It's definitely a trend.
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.
> It's very noticeably in building architecture. 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.
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.
> It's very noticeably in building architecture. 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.
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 simplici…
The design cycle is especially obvious in the case of Airbnb et al.: they all went from having cursive logo fonts to sans-serif. In other words: the only thing that’s new with the current cycle is that it’s a minimal cycle, making a lot of designs converge. I’m sure we’ll see a larger variety of designs with the next cycle, underlying design philosophy permitting.
What do you gain? Did everyone suddenly start thinking Google was new and fresh after they spent however many millions on their rebrand? And then there's the inherent contradiction. Is a logo important, if not why are you changing it, if it is, why are you throwing out the current valuable logo, or are you implicitly accepting you somehow failed and tainted the old logo?
All I see is a company bike shedding rather than spending the money and effort to improve their offering.