Sanding away character isn’t limited to typefaces. As we all seek to fit into a well defined and streamlined “likes” driven society do we not also sand away parts of our own character?
Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
81–90 of 175 posts
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#82I think the generic answer is trend and fashion, mixed with fear of failure. If you do it like/similar to everyone else, you won't get the blame. If the company/brand fails, everyone is going to put the blame on someone else. Yeah, the designer did this strange thing and it totally tanked the brand.
As a designer, I think this is correct. The boring sans-serif logo is the “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” of logo design.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#83Design 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…
Your business is probably most interested in whether this new design increased value in some way. Did people open the app more?
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#84[flagged]
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#85Q: Why do everyone’s logo fonts look the same? 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 kind…
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 wer…
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.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#86Design 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…
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…
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.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#87Q: Why do everyone’s logo fonts look the same? 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 kind…
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.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#88I thought the trend in fashion could be traced back to the rise of non Western customers. Many Chinese and Middle Eastern people can read Latin characters well, but it’s still easier in a cleaner font.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#89partly its because it just doesnt matter EXACTLY what font. you might give Elon's rebranding of Twitter to the Unicode X glyph as a most famous recent exemplar application of this perspective -- plus it saves money on custom font crafting or analysis work.
two: there really are a certain set of traits an ideal font should have and only a subset of all possible fonts have them. so just pick one of them, dammit -- Janet! -- and move on.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serifs improve legibility of small prints. With modern HiDPI screens, there is no reason not to use serif fonts across all media.
Serif fonts read terribly on displays of basically any size and dpi, I don't even use them when reading books on e-ink displays
Serif fonts read fine on any screen with at least a pixel density of Apple's Retina displays. Subjective preferences are another matter, of course. I prefer serifs even on worse displays, because my brain decodes them better. And I will basically refuse to read sans serif in print, or rather, my brain refuses to comply anyway.