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Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

joukovsky.substack.com

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Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#281

Post by systemicdanna »

tokai wrote: post #3

Another ring logo. Its hilarious how many low effort logos, with a ring, graphic designers fool people into accepting.

It's amazing how people without any understanding of design processes judge outcomes as "low effort".

Familiarize yourself with these processes (e.g. check out IDEO). Talk to professional designers. Try to design a logo.

It's frankly ridiculous to expect a revolutionary logo every time these discussions happen. This is not a "lines of code" metric. If designers work on a logo for 6 months the deliverable is not "the biggest logo you have ever seen". It can be a squiggle.

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#282

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

Eduard wrote: post #251
ARandomerDude wrote: post #244

Oh good, now they're easily visually distinguished from Raytheon [1], Frost Bank [2], and the other turbofan logo companies. [1] https://www.rtx.com/ [2] https://www.frostbank.com/

A further entry in the turbofan logo category: https://www.hertie.de/

I had completely forgotten about that logo. Shows how old the turbofan motif is really.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertie_Waren-_und_Kaufhaus#/me...

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#283

Post by cpcallen »

323 wrote: post #41
cpcallen wrote: post #10

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 Nort…

The Amazon "smile" logo is pretty good.

This is _definitely_ a _brilliant_ rebrand, at least in hindsight: I'm not sure I loved it at the time, and seem to recall finding the asymmetry and curviness of the arrowhead slightly disturbing.

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#284

Post by systemicdanna »

booleandilemma wrote: post #260

I hope it doesn't take us too much longer to swing back to the trend of having detailed, interesting logos again. There's more to logos than making sure they look good as a favicon.

Yes, any time now... Right after we swing back to composing pompous classical music and eating fowl dishes out of gold encrusted bowls.

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#285

Post by systemicdanna »

Dig1t wrote: post #266
uni_rule wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What of those platitudes makes you feel victimized?

I do not personally feel victimized, the shitty logo is the victim. The point is that a redesign wasn't necessary, it was a good logo with a long and interesting history. But it was redone to signal that they are falling in line with the prevailing ideology of the day.

My guess is that there are many reasons to redesign a logo like that. It looks:

1. Elitist (who speaks Latin?)

2. Forgettable (show this logo to a student from India and then ask to pick it out of 10 similar coats of arms)

3. Ugly (subjective, but... thick curves everywhere, all caps words with hyphens, 3 crowns?..)

4. Hard to adapt to new global use cases (too detailed to make small, too confusing internationally)

5. many more reasons...

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#286

Post by neuralRiot »

tablespoon wrote: post #18
frakt0x90 wrote: post #4

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.

> 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. It's modernist, minimalist crap, indistinguishable from all the other modernist, minimalist crap. Everyone might as well rebrand as solid-color circle distinguish…

To me the old logo had some meaning, the new, is just one more tryng to fit in an app icon.

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#287

Post by OJFord »

collegeburner wrote: post #105
OJFord wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask any British person what 'The Met' is and they'll say 'London police' (or similar). I doubt an American museum could ever change that, embracing something so generic is limiting for identity & brand awareness IMO.

Ask anyone outside of Britain what "The Met" is and you'll hear about the museum. I don't think one very small country should be the primary blocker to their branding decisions.

I didn't mean it like 'think of the British', I meant 'think of yourself' - you want a strong brand identity right, that's the whole point of this kind of exercise I assume, and you have a much better shot at that with something unique/specific/weird.

Nobody outside of the UK is thinking about police foremost when they here 'met', (unless there's similarly named constabularies elsewhere perhaps, wouldn't surprise me if someone piped up from HK/India/Australia to say their city's police is also 'the met' for example) but that doesn't matter to that met.

Say there's some artist called so-and-so Park, you'd be ill-advised to start a gallery called 'The Park', it's not at all unique, it's poorly googleable, it's unlikely to ever be the first thing that comes to mind when someone hears the name.

Another example: I think OnePlus (or is it OnePlusOne? I honestly don't even know) - the phone company - is held back by its poor choice of name. I'm not denying its success, I just think it's despite the name, that it could be a lot bigger, have a much stronger brand.

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#288

Post by OJFord »

munificent wrote: post #205
pacaro wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious as to what your definition of very small is. The UK is above median land area for a country, #21 for population, #6 for gdp, it's principal island is the 9th largest. I mean, yes, the UK is not the same scale as the USA, China, India etc, but I'd put to you that it is not so very small

England has about 2% of the area of the US, so from a US perspective, it's quite small.

Double the population of Canada though.

I agree we're small, much smaller than the USA by any metric, but surely we're talking about population rather than land mass here.

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#289

Post by Godel_unicode »

systemicdanna wrote: post #277
Godel_unicode wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. While there have been fads in the past that some logos adhered to, the history of insignia is overflowing with what we would today call logos that were not coats of arms.

Every epoch in the insignia design had a distinct style, right? Roman military insignia looked like Roman military insignia, there wasn't a vast range of styles within that use case / time period. Outside of military use and maybe some rare other state uses, there wasn't much insignia, and especially not much insignia that you would call a logo by today's application.

Of course there was, especially in Roman times when most couldn’t read. The gods all had their symbols, as did the many vendors. Many cities had emblems they added to things like gates, walls, and money, and prominent families had seals they would use for official documents as well as decoration.

These came in many styles and had a lovely variety which sprang from the message the person wanted to send and what they thought looked cool.

Re: Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad

#290

Post by taeric »

cpcallen wrote: post #276
taeric wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to think of a rebrand that I truly hated and that led to actual decline in something. I... can't. There are plenty that I confess I don't like. But I would be struggling to put any actual significance to a label. The new street fighter one, as an example. I agree that it feels off that they are ditching the styling that they have used for literal decades. That said, I fail to see how that is at all importa…

> I'm trying to think of a rebrand that I truly hated and that led to actual decline in something. I'm not claiming that a bad rebrand spells doom for the entity (though I guess there are probably examples of that)—only that I can think of few rebrands where the new brand _made me more positively disposed towards the entity in question_. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one; consider this list of brand U-turns: h…

Coca Cola is the classic example for this sort of thing. However, I feel that something is off on that story. For one, the brand has moved on from the "classic" with basically no fanfare. Similarly, they have marched on from the recipe, again with no fanfare. I remember a case study once that showed that they actually did taste test the changes and that, at large, the change was the one that was liked by more people. However, the narrative got out of their control and the perception was that the old way was better. So, they cashed in on that and basically used the event as a way to re-establish their brand. Very odd story.

Would be interesting to see what the others are like. The GAP is an odd one, to me. As they, notably, don't have branding on their clothes. At least, not universally? (Do I just not see it on the ones I'm checking?)

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