Johnson and Johnson is getting rid of its script logo after more than 130 years | Hacker News Reader

Johnson and Johnson is getting rid of its script logo after more than 130 years

cnbc.com

31 pointshammock60 comments

College-educated-but-not-currently-practicing graphic designer checking in: It's astonishing to me that major brands are still trending in the direction of "simplify the mark into a basic sans-serif" (even though, as basic sans-serifs go, this is a pretty nice one and on the more unique side). It's the ultimate safe choice that brings change for the sake of change and makes everyone feel like they've done something.

> “Because it’s easier, it almost even draws your attention to it,”

There's no way this is is true.

This isn't basic sans serif at all, I quite like it. It's distinctive while also feeling trustworthy.

I agree there are a lot of generic sans serif logos out there but this isn't one of them. The old logo had gotten incredibly dated -- it looked like your great-grandparents' brand. (Which it was.)

>>This isn't basic sans serif at all, I quite like it. It's distinctive while also feeling trustworthy.

Fascinating!

If we assume that a logo is not targeted to expert professionals, but consumers at large; do you think you can help me as a somewhat nerdy but otherwise average consumer understand in which way it is not a basic sans serif at all? I'm not even remotely a font geek, yet even so have probably paid slightly more attention to fonts than anybody I know in real life and I haven't a clue in which way this is not basic, or is distinctive. I'm asking with genuine curiosity - much appreciated!:)

It has a bit of stroke contrast, which is less typical of popular sans-serif fonts. Optima was a popular example of this in the 90s. It has a pretty tall x-height too which is probably made with "small print of logo at bottom of ~shampoo~ pill bottle" in mind; it helps mitigate the problem the mark being much wider than it is tall.

But your reply is why I said what I said originally - I see those differences, crazygringo sees those differences, but I'm sure most people don't.

I guess the "&" is quite distinctive, and the letters are have different vert/hori stroke widths, and a few minor other details. But still, in comparison, the normal logo is way more distinctive and ... pretty, imo

It's a good execution for sure, but there's no way you can say it became a more distinctive mark.

Saying the old logo is dated is like saying the GE mark or the Coca Cola and Disney scripts are dated. The only reason you'd say it is because it's not conforming to a generic sans-serif norm. These brands have built up a ton of equity in their marks and are timeless enough to build a fresh modern identity around them.

But the J&J logo and name also doesn't apply to the consumer products anymore -- Band-Aids, Johnson's Baby, etc. were split off into Kenvue this year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenvue

J&J is now entirely focused on pharmaceuticals and medical devices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_%26_Johnson

So the new different logo makes a lot of sense for what is essentially now an entirely different company in the eyes of consumers.

> it looked like your great-grandparents' brand

I think that's the value in it. A brand that hasn't changed in a hundred years, that you remember in your grandparents cupboard where you were five years old, that's been in the background for your entire life... you can't invent that provenance, and once it's gone, it's gone.

I know what you mean. Script fonts are so 1890's. Every time I drink a Coke I think, "Another Spencerian script? So bacchanalian! So dated! We anatomically modern humans are not interested in type more emotive than prison signage. The logo should have been reset in a contemporary sans-serif with a few curves thrown in to remind us how irrational we once were." I feel like I'm drinking something found covered in dust while cleaning out my grandfather's basement--next to his violin.

They're just making stuff up at this point.

> The new look, which includes a different shade of red, aims to recognize J&J’s shift into a “pure play health care company,"

Reminds me of the Pepsi brand white paper (which I have no idea if it was legit or not, but it smells such).

My mind takes me to:

"We decided to make our color a slightly darker red than standard maroon, but only by 1 point of hue, because we know that subconsciously the person will finally associate our brand with the world ending dread that we are hoping to convey"

I literally think its just a bunch of people trying to stay relevant and answer the question of "why do you even get paid 10 million a year?"

At that point why not just call it like Kevin and Steve or something, it'll be unrecognizable and move publicly away from the vile reputation that J&J has had.

In any case, I will keep ignoring this nonsense. Maybe one day they will rebrand to writing out J&J in a language that doesn't exist to show that they are so future thinking, we can't even fathom what the brand is!

Look at that subtle change in red coloring. The tasteful thickness of the sans serif font. Oh my God, it even has a watermark...

Huge respect to brands that don't fall for the transient whims and fads of graphic design, but stick it out with their old logos. https://www.imagerelay.com/blog/oldest-logos-that-still-exis...

Wait long enough and the old stuff comes back in style, proving that all the justifications for the "new" style were baseless.

I cringe every time I see the Sherwin Williams logo. It is a bucket of paint being dumped on the earth. Imagine if BPs logo was just an oil spill

I associate that with a certain mindset in the 1950s.. the same people that built steel mills and chemical plants in the Ohio valley, polluting so badly that a river actually caught fire. It is a blatent and smug assertion that mocks the sensibilities of even a casual environmentalist. Make no mistake, plenty of Fortune 500 and also dot-mil, fosters internal leadership with exactly this gestalt.

> Many children no longer learn to write cursive in school. [...] People may recognize the signature, but they weren’t necessarily reading it.

Does this sound alarming to anyone besides me?

I don't have a problem with children not learning cursive, but the idea that one couldn't interpret the J&J logo is pretty absurd. It's a very intelligible script.

That's probably because you can read English in cursive. It's hard to imagine what it might might look like without that knowledge. But try reading something written in cursive in a language you don't speak. Even with the clearest penmanship, it's very difficult. All the letter-forms are similar and context is really important for decoding it. Here's an example of something in Norwegian [1], written in a style of cursive quite similar to how I write English cursive. I can make out some letters and a few words with confidence, but it's mostly scribbles to me.

Even this Swedish text, with such perfect penmanship [2], is a bit challenging in spots. (I don't speak either language.)

Going back to Johnson & Johnson, that "ohn" sequence in the cursive "Johnson" could easily be confused with sequences like "iunr" or "lins" or "fins".

The only way you can learn to read that is probably by learning to write it. It relies on knowing that e.g. there's a sharp flick of the pen, and a very light line drawn, between the tail end of the "h" and the start of the "n". That's how we know it's the end of an "h" and the beginning of an "n", and not the middle of an "u" which would be drawn with a slightly darker, more curved line. Along with context hints, from the language and content.

[1] https://readcoop.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/unnamed-1.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/S8QTFDp.jpg

Exactly this. The last time I used cursive was 3rd grade when I learned it. When I was in college, the admin were appalled that I couldn't read their handwriting. I'd have to take these cursive notes to other older adults to narrate for me. It turns out no one my age could read cursive, despite all of us being perfectly literate.

That's hard to believe. Only five out of the twenty-six letters have different lowercase representations than their print versions.

> perfectly literate

Does this not include handwriting as well?

Not at all. I bet most commonly seen brand logos are recognized rather than read. I'm not even sure why that'd be a bad thing.

Cursive serves very little purpose today. I'm not surprised to see it steadily disappearing.

Soon it'll be like in Turkey --- there will be a specialty of folks who can read cursive scripts and transcribe them (though in Turkey it's reading Turkish which was written using Arabic script and transliterating it into Roman)

A ton of kids did not understand that Disney's "D" was a "D" and the brand seems to have done okay in spite of that.

Funny you mention Disney as I feel the 'y' is clearly the hardest letter to make out.

Waly Gisnep

I thought it was Disnep as a kid. Even as an adult now the 'y' looks much more like a handwritten lowercase Greek 'phi' than an English 'y'.

As a kid in the 1980s, I always thought the logo was spelt "Disnep," even though we all said "Disney."

I think plenty of people can read cursive without spending 2-4 years writing it.

No. I would have been much better off learning proper typing than cursive.

They tried to teach us both in school, but neither really stuck.

Nope. Cursive today is archaic. And that's fine.

It's no different from not knowing how to use a slide rule.

I am old enough to still know how to use a slide rule, but I have not used one in decades. I can also scribble in cursive, but I have not done that in years either.

At some point, I noticed that I rarely wrote down something, and when I did, it became instantly unsearchable and therefore as good as lost. For a while, I scanned my written notes, but as soon as swipe keyboards on smartphones became a thing, I just switched over to 100% digital notes.

So, yes, it is hard to imagine a use for cursive anymore. Good riddance.

I grew up at a time when cursive was obviously fading away. In third grade we had to write cursive for all our work after half the year because we were going to use it all the time.

Haven't written cursive since (signatures aren't cursive, they're more of a logo than anything) maybe fourth grade. I type all day. I can read cursive but I swear cursive has so much variation in legibility that it's a nightmare sometimes.

Typing as a skill has replaced cursive and, while I think knowing to read cursive is good, I don't find it important.

"Cursive handwriting engages sensorimotor brain regions that are not activated by typewriting"

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202...

"For young adults, we found that when writing by hand using a digital pen on a touchscreen, brain areas in the parietal and central regions showed event-related synchronized activity in the theta range. Existing literature suggests that such oscillatory neuronal activity in these particular brain areas is important for memory and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning. When drawing, we found similar activation patterns in the parietal areas, in addition to event-related desynchronization in the alpha/beta range, suggesting both similarities but also slight differences in activation patterns when drawing and writing by hand. When typewriting on a keyboard, we found event-related desynchronized activity in the theta range and, to a lesser extent, in the alpha range in parietal and central brain regions. However, as this activity was desynchronized and differed from when writing by hand and drawing, its relation to learning remains unclear."

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0181...

Neither of those references are about writing in cursive. They are about writing with hand vs typing.

Any benefit found will still be there if people use print letters; or scribble fast shorthand.

Beginner typing is a discrete muscle action, under conscious control and attention. Hunt for, or try to remember, where the letter is. Hit the key. Then the next. Sort of jerky. Letter by letter. Fluent typing is a more composite act, a sort of dance where the fingers roll back and forth in combined motions efficiently. Not coincidentally, fluent typists are prone to mixing up words like "fluid" and "fluent", as I just did and had to correct. Type entire words or phrases correctly, incorrectly. Often they sound similar or have a similar semantic sense. Slightly fuzzy erroneous activation, of ingrained muscle memory patterns, is my interpretation of that effect.

A similar level of fluency emerges with handwriting over time. One stops forming individual letters, and whole sequences become one extended flow of the pen. Entire words. It detaches the executive function and short term memory and attention of the mind, from the flow of individual letters and how words are spelled and put together. That becomes an automatic process. We might want to encourage that fluency in more than one mode.

Why would we want that fluency in more than one mode? Isn’t print lettering enough?

It’s not as if more is better. Sometimes more is just more to learn and not have time for other things.

I learned mechanics from the Ford Motor Company training camp and got a good job when I was 16. Fancy decorative writing means nothing to me.

Yeah when I was in school I remember them saying all professional/academic writing had to be cursive. What a lie lol

Cursive really shines with fountain pens. Your modern gel/rollerball/ballpoint pin barely benefits from cursive. It’s like lamenting that the kids these days don’t know how to use an abacus. If you only had enough time to teach a kid how to use excel or an abacus I’d choose excel. If you only had enough time to teach a kid how to type or how to use cursive I’d choose how to type.

As far as ballpoints go you're right, but I struggle to write in print with my Stabilo roller-ball pen; it really wants to write cursive.

You're definitely not alone, but I don't really get it. As far as I'm concerned, it's like worrying that people don't learn how to rebuild a carburetor anymore. Cursive greatly aids in legibility for things like quills and fountain pens, but it's hardly a necessity in the age of dirt-cheap ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils.

carburetor skills was an advanced training topic at the Ford Company Training Camp, I did not need it for our squad assignments, so I guess I did not miss out. I make good money on our conveyor line. Fancy decorative writing means nothing to me.

What's the alarm? Without cursive you can still communicate perfectly well by most forms of reading and writing, with the specific exception of longer form hand-written documents which are becoming rare in society.

In elementary school I learned cursive and was told it was very important because when I got to college all professors would require submissions to be in neat, legible cursive writing.

When I got to high school any submission not printed in Times New Roman, 12pt, Double Spaced would be graded as zero.

When I got to college it was the same but submitted to an online portal instead of printed.

Not to me. Cursive writing has changed significantly over time. The formal flowing cursive from previous centuries was already unreadable to students from two decides ago.

Ballpoint pens removed many of the advantages of cursive, since you didn't need to worry about how the ink got from the pen to the page.

Today, typing has already largely replace handwriting.

History matches on. Some of the traditions and methods of the past really aren't as long lived as you think.

I never thought about that. Was cursive a workaround for non-modern pens? I thought it has to do about writing speed, but this was a relevation..

> Cursive writing has changed significantly over time. The formal flowing cursive from previous centuries was already unreadable to students from two decides ago.

I had no problem reading 18th century scripts while doing amateur genealogy research. And I'm not specialist - almost dyslectic.

We had to have our 15 year old daughter do some paperwork to start her driver learning and when I asked for her signature, she was quite puzzled! Cursive was taught when I grew up but I don't find a use for it anymore myself. I am sure it lends to speed but my cursive handwriting is awful to try and reread, but normal case I can do pretty well.

My cursive has utterly atrophied from disuse over decades.

Even my signature is losing any aesthetic it ever had, because I only ever do it on a shitty stylus screen where it makes no difference.

I didn't start cursive until 3rd grade. I wrote it for at least a decade in school. Now I can't write it.

In 1st grade we spent about 30 minutes practicing typing positions on a photocopied PCJunior keyboard. I still use those positions.

I wonder how much “many children “ is. My kids go to a charter school and learned cursive in 3rd or 4th grade. They are required to do all of their writing assignments in cursive. The public school district is we’re in also teaches cursive.

It seems like the key thing here is that Johnson & Johnson ditched the consumer brands, so it wants to ditch the consumer image. Everything else is just marketing puffery.

I wonder which side of the split, Kenvue or J&J, maintains the pre-1905 right to commercial use of the Red Cross logo?

>The original script — based on co-founder James Wood Johnson’s signature — will still be seen for now on consumer products like baby shampoo

so not really getting rid of it then. they're restructuring, and the parent company will get a serious-business version of the logo to differentiate itself from the comsumer products business.

It blows my mind that companies are still following this boring, plain sans-serif trend. You throw out a 130 years of branding because of the current en vogue trend, which is actually probably on its way out at this point?

This is a great way for me to never recognize their products.

The Johnson&Johnson logo was soft and comforting. The new one looks like a bank logo or a legal office. Horrible move when you're selling comfort products and not financial services.

Changing your logo won't make us forget how you tried to kill us.[1][2][3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18684384

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20803879

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10345650

"Many children no longer learn to write cursive in school" ... The new logo, she said, is easier to process."

My favorite license plate is California's because of the cursive script. To me, it's both elegant and modern (maybe that makes me old in terms of marketdroids). I suppose California should be getting rid of that. /s

I predict their sales will fall by at least 10% in the first year after the have fully gotten rid of their historic logo compared to the last year the fully used it.

Trashing a long history of brand recognition is never a good move for an MBA.

Bummer. I don't like the company but the logo was really easy on the eyes. Although when I was a kid I had the same kind of problem with it as I had with Disney's - for the latter I always read it as "Disnep"

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