My guess is that is because the typeface has to look good in print, signage, large screens, small screens, stitched into cloth, and stamped into buttons.
Has anyone worked in textiles and know the tradeoffs of different typefaces?
It does make me wonder whether there has been any shift in the management of these companies, where they are no longer run by people with any commitment to any sort of brand or design integrity? Or did that happen long ago and the logos were just holdovers from a different time?
Maybe I’m just caught up in false, romantic notions and these companies have always just been mass-producing corporate entities desperately trying to do whatever is trendy to appeal to the widest audience, whilst creating an illusion of exclusivity to justify massive profit margins?
Or they mean really well, and tried their very best, and this is what they came up with. Or too many people had a say in it, and it averaged out at bland.
The thing that I found worse than the boring fonts is the change from "London, England", to "London England". I would "respect" "London, England" written in Comic Sans more than "London England" in any font. It just gives off this "the lights are on, but nobody's home" vibe to me.
You're joking, right? Those letter forms aren't really all that cursive. If kids can pick up that a tall loop is a lowercase L, then they can read that. It's probably only a problem with readers for whom Roman is not their native character set -- reading handwritten Japanese is probably an order of magnitude harder for me than printed text.
That said, does Coca-Cola's swirl come off as pretentious? I think there's a lot to be said for continuity in branding, and Coca-Cola is certainly a master of branding and marketing.
The introduction of computing systems has done incredible things with normalizing representations of the written language. Most text read by all people today are confined down to a small number of typefaces. There is far less exposure to the diverse variety of even the non-cursive written word that is unique to each individual. If we have a population that not only no longer learns how to write in cursive, combined with the fact that they hand-write disproportionately lower than their previous generations, I think we're going to be surprised by its side-effects.
They all moving with breakneck speed to make sure all their branding and sales channel fit with the mobile trend, and logo have some unique issues (like not being responsive) that hamper legibility and would make them feel out of place in a responsive-style website
Open for example rimowa site now on mobile and you'll see the logo fit perfectly with the home other components.
The limiting factor as you say is legibility, but not the logo itself, it's the mobile experience that doesn't allow large style permutation on the design language. The logo here becomes slave of that.
In fact when sold to “last season” liquidators many high fashion labels are cut or removed to indicate loss of value