Discussion about fashion and trends aside, A lot of it driven by a desire to make the branding easy to reproduce across web formats. I wonder if that’s an indictment of the web…
Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
111–120 of 175 posts
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. But this effect isn't limited to design. How many cookie cutter / copy-cat businesses (i.e., apps) do we see? The origin of lack of (brand) identity is rooted in the companies themselves and their leadership. The irony? Avoiding risk is itself a risk. The higher your chance of failure, the more significant this risk (from self-commodit-izing).
Also maybe a symptom of chasing a quick profit in the short term over other considerations, such as product quality. So better play it safe so the valuation rises by the time the manager/designer/marketer has moved on to another company?
Maybe. But the designer only presents ideas / concepts. Final sign-off on generic comes from the founder(s) or someone higher up the tree.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#113Discussion about fashion and trends aside, A lot of it driven by a desire to make the branding easy to reproduce across web formats. I wonder if that’s an indictment of the web…
Not everything is an indictment of the web.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#114Design 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…
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Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#115The one that bums me out the most is the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They went from an elegant serif font to a bland sans with a few funky tails. Before: https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/6a356... After: https://creativereview.imgix.net/content/uploads/2022/09/MFA... Their stated purpose was to make it more accessible. The reasoned that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the…
Here's Erik Spiekermann on the Johnson & Johnson logo change:
"I’m so fed up with marketing people running projects without acknowledging that we designers might have an idea or two about what communicates and what doesn’t. They’ve been told by tech guys and lazy designers that things have to be simplified to work on screens. This is knowledge from the 90s and not true anymore. Risk and guts have been replaced by bullshit “narratives” invented by people who’ve never taken a risk in their lives.
This is the blandification of our world, where fun has to be taken out of the equation because it cannot be quantified. No consumer cares about a company’s internal reorganization, they want to like a brand. When all brands are beige, the beigest one will not win but will be forgotten.
The enshittification of our world is run by people who read spreadsheets in bed and look at their smartphones to tell the weather instead of sticking their heads out of the window.
Sometimes I’m glad I’m old and don’t have to take orders from gutless employed managers anymore. My best clients were those I could argue with. It wasn’t about winning or being right, it was about doing the best work.
Thank you Audi, Deutsche Bahn, BVG, Bosch, Ottobock, The Economist …"
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their stated purpose was to make it more accessible. The reasoned that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the space intimidating to people who didn’t hold those things to be part of their culture and that it was out of tune with the increasing diversity of their collection and programs. Can put this under the dictionary definition of insanity. Or someone needed justification to get paid without d…
> The reasoned that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the space intimidating to people who didn’t hold those things to be part of their culture and that it was out of tune with the increasing diversity of their collection and programs. The whole purpose of an actually inclusive "Museum of Fine Arts" should have been the opposite: to make people appreciate, understand, and enjoy things that they do…
>...expand their cultural horizons and lift their tastes.
Their tastes prior, being (considered) lower?
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#117There'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…
Hopefully AI will make those uncreative designers redundant, freeing them to do something more aligned with their talents.
AI will need to get much better, unfortunately, for that to happen. And AI will trigger even more minimalism in the short run.
This is because minimalism encourages extremely precise, exact abstracted designs where a single pixel being wrong is visible. While generative AI always has, and will indefinitely, be best at a profusion of exuberant detail where errors or repetition are concealed by the density. You can generate great photographic images or montages right now with MJ or DALL-E 3, but you will struggle to get anything which is a crisp sharp vector. Even vector-generating services like Recraft.ai aren't that good. (Note also how long it took generative AI to be able to do pixel art. We were trivially generating photorealistic faces while pixel art GANs weren't working at all.)
So, as a reaction to generative AI, designers & fashion will flee to minimalism in order to not look 'cheap'.
The vector art & typography will be a proof-of-work that a human made it and a costly signal of 'quality'. While anything photographic or painting-like, especially if presented as a single large raster image, will increasingly feel untrustworthy, cheap, and mass-produced.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#118I’m in favor. More legible, easier and cheaper to reproduce, good rendering in small sizes. Brands need more differentiation when they’re new. Once they’re established, the name and the product stands for itself. I don’t get why people care so much about this. Do they also bother with people using t-shirts rather of suits? Simpler logos are more functional. Logos also don’t exist on a vacuum (like a JPEG in an article), they are accompanied with other elements of visual language. Hand picking some logos and putting them all together in order to make a statement about a perceived trend is artificial. There are much more fancy logos than simpler ones overall, so nowadays simpler stand out more. Also, there’s nuance in simple, it’s not just “sans serif”, there’s weight, spacing, contrast and proportion differences. A design must be evaluated in its own context and usage, unlike they do in these articles. I’ve lost count of these superficial attacks on “minimalism” which appear on the net. I bet not one of the designers responsible for such redesigns did that on basis of a trend, each project had a specific scope and rationale, but somehow people attack designers like they are all getting stupid, yeah, sure, random people on the internet must know better than designers evolving their craft and understanding for decades, working closely with clients to realize a comprehensive and carefully crafted vision.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reasoned that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the space intimidating to people who didn’t hold those things to be part of their culture and that it was out of tune with the increasing diversity of their collection and programs. The whole purpose of an actually inclusive "Museum of Fine Arts" should have been the opposite: to make people appreciate, understand, and enjoy things that they do…
>...expand their cultural horizons and lift their tastes. Their tastes prior, being (considered) lower?
Yes, it's called aesthetics.
Re: Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
#120Anyone throwing some examples that bring the fun back? I'll add the first 2cts with https://omg.lol Minimalism plus serif combined in colorful design.