Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
justcreative.com
justcreative.com
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 bland and generic.
A few years ago we had an app and our designer came up with an intense shade of red that was slightly pinkish. He then proceeded to use that for our app icon. Net result: it jumped out from all the other icons on the phones apps drawer. The whole app looked fantastic but that icon was awesome. You could not not notice it. Everybody else was using fashionable blues and greens that literally everybody uses.
The irony? Avoiding risk is itself a risk. The higher your chance of failure, the more significant this risk (from self-commodit-izing).
For example, if you are an expensive brand for people of age over 30 but under 50, 20 years later your 30y/o customer will be 50 and will drop out. Now you need to convey to the newly coming of age humans that your brand is expensive high quality one but they associate different styles and symbols with high quality than the previous generations and therefore you will need to re-design your logo to mach the new taste. If the new people don't associate the British royal symbolism with the stuff your brand stands for, you drop them and embrace contemporary symbolism, for example. Therefore, the source of the imitation is not really imitation but an attempt of different brands to capture the new symbolism.
In other words, If everyone drinks coffee in the morning it's not an imitation to serve coffee in the morning.
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 kinds of treatments. Perhaps we’ll find another design trick to facilitate legibility at smaller scales but until then, those marks that looked great in print, aren’t fit for purpose.
Or someone on a 1336x720 Chromebook.
Some of the most beautiful and enjoyable fonts I have used in my 300-dpi e-book reader have serifs.
- Ancizar
- Bookerly
- Imperial (the one used by NYTimes)
- Palatino
And Calibri, which is a font that can't decide if it wants to have serifs or not.
I can't have enough fonts.
Offtopic:
I switched from MPlus Code font to Iosevka just this week for my terminal, VSCode, and Emacs use. Partly due to finding Iosevka more pleasing, its support for ligatures, and liking its italics.
Looking at it now, MPlus is a little simpler while Iosevka has a bit more... Personality?
MPlus: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#mplus
Iosevka: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#iosevka
Iosevka has a few serif-like features that distinguish it from MPlus, and on the hidpi screens I use, it's easier on my aging eyesight.
Serif fonts are still existant, with newspapers, lawyers, notaries and aimilar professions. Most modern corporations just don't want to go that direction, because this isn't how they want to be perceived.
As a UX designer I hate this but that’s the reality of why every site has the same boring flat design.
Semi-unrelated rant: why do many entirely digital web typefaces have ink traps? They look terrible. On paper, they were meant to be filled in by overflowing ink and thus render the glyphs as intended, but they just look weird and bad on a high-resolution digital display.
Add it to the many things that made it from the necessary to the aesthetic.
https://daniel.do/article/making-noisy-svgs/ (I link to the second post in the first paragraph)
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 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.
I think that’s the real trend here: change. Sans is so tempting because it hardly means anything and so designers will tell you it’s a blank canvas you can imbue with whatever values you want. If those values change, you don’t have to tear down your whole identity.
That’s deeply appealing for firms in the tech world considering the rapid change of pace. What’s disappointing to me is to see cultural institutions take the same defensive approach. A logo change is fine, but saying “we want to be accessible to everybody so we’ll strip out anything that ties us to a time, place, or tradition” is like trying to make a welcoming living room by replacing all the sofas, tables, and rugs with a milk crate and a metal foldout chair.
It doesn’t have to be that way. A few miles away the Boston Athenaeum did a rebrand with the same usual rhetoric on accessibility and diversity, but came through with a font that fits their tradition
Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20210126132351/https://bostonath...
After: https://bostonathenaeum.org/
Can put this under the dictionary definition of insanity. Or someone needed justification to get paid without doing any real work.
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 don't feel are "part of their culture", expand their cultural horizons and lift their tastes.
Not to excise things they don't identify with, and feed them "safe" stuff tailored to them. That's entertainment.
Their tastes prior, being (considered) lower?
Of course this requires an era where the opinion of people devoted to studying, discussing, and creating fine art isn't supposed to be equally respected to that of Joe Sixpack, Jaqueline Middlebrow, Joy Belieber, Arthur Incel, or Random J. Person, where everything is up to personal taste.
Why change, grow, or learn if you don't think the state after is better than before?
People steeped in Classicism need to have their horizons expanded too, right?
I would ask anyone who is labeling it as "insane" what their own background is how European it is before they dismiss efforts to appeal to groups with other histories, and often painful ones as they relate to European history.
I have heard elders complain about the proliferation of the English language itself to be a cause for decline in fluency of the native language, but I can almost guarantee no one has ever thought about the influences of a font. I mean there are actual fish to fry here, starting with legislation, monetary consequences, property rights…I do not see how fonts moves the needle at all, except patting oneself on their back.
Maybe not but we know that they do affect people's perceptions whether they're conscious of it or not.
I think it's fantastic that your family was engaged with museums while you were growing up but we also know that there's a demographic divide in engagement across the wider population. In the UK more than half of white families visit museums annually but for black families that's closer to one in three.[0]
> I mean there are actual fish to fry here, starting with legislation, monetary consequences, property rights
100% but those issues are beyond the operational scope of an individual museum trying to improve its engagement.
0: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/culture-a...
Fonts, colors, wording, architecture, etc. all have influences on you, me, and everyone else. They are a form of language and communication and you can both update fonts at the same time as legislation and everything else.
Even if one is not apart of this heritage, this should be respected as the foundation of the art itself.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here? Many museums are stuffed with objects taken from around the world, often forecfully. There was such pressure on other cultures to provide objects for Europe that there's even a display in Rotterdam's Wereldmuseum of fascinating objects from the Congo that were made with an intentionally brutal "primitive" aesthetic because that's what the Europeans wanted from them. They even went to the trouble of inventing rotuals associated with these objects.
I guess you could argue that those pieces were somehow created through European colonialism, but even then the designs and implementation were all Congolese.
I think the people who appreciate colonialism are indeed being denounced very intentionally by more and more of the world's cultural insitutions. It's very much intentional.
The result is denuded and unmoored. It’s as soulless here in Boston as it would be if the aesthetic infected cultural institutions in Tokyo or Addis Ababa.
I bet the people in charge meant well, they just did a bad job.
I’ve seen very few firms of any sort do that well.
Then I'm sure we're both unqualified to give our views on it too.
So what? These people don't have to go there. There's a whole bunch of places and things I find unappealing, so I don't seek it out.
By destroying culture, you're also robbing people who would appreciate it from an experience. And people who appreciate something can come from all kinds of backgrounds.
I'm not sure how an institution using a different typeface with the aim of being more inclusive is "destroying culture" to such a degree that it should be a serious consideration when weighed against the benefits. Could you explain further what you meant by that?
Of course the people who enjoy these things can come from any type of background but first they have to fell welcome to even experience them. Currently in my native country the research shows that white people are almost twice as likely to visit a museum in the first place compared to black people. I personally find that a real shame because I think everyone can benefit from visitng them.
> Of course the people who enjoy these things can come from any type of background but first they have to fell welcome to even experience them.
And in what way would somebody feel unwelcome by a font? Why is a serif font less welcoming than a sans serif font? When you do the thinking for other people and when you're feeling oppressed on their behalf, maybe you should instead re-evaluate what you're doing. Are you as an enlightened hacker able to appreciate different cultures, expressions, and even typefaces with a cool self-distance, while people who are lesser than you have to be baby-sat by other enlightened individuals that protect them from unfamiliar columns and serifs?
That's quite a lot of nasty to put onto me and I would ask you not to do that.
I'm not doing anyone's thinking. The position that typography carries associative and emotional weight is not novel here. I think you know very well that serif fonts carry a sense of formality and even authority that sans fonts don't.
I'm also not the one making these changes. I'm not sure why you think these decisions are being left up to me and people like me. The MFABoston has quite a robust inclusivity policy and they not only take on board research on these issues but they also facilitate direct contact where possible from people from various groups outside of their own sphere, including experts and service users/potential service users. Further to that they are also committed to a diversity and inclusivity policy with regards to their staffing, offering things like bias training to staff as well as offering staff "employee resource groups" that support staff who are members of societal groups that face systemic barriers to having their voices heard in order to help them overcome those barriers.
If you have any ideas on things they're missing you can contact them via their website.
> When you're destroying architecture you're destroying culture. The same technocrats who has filled the world with the most depressing brutalist architecture are claiming that some mysterious "others" suffer greatly from the classical looks of museums.
Which technocrats are these? The psychology of architecture is also not a novel idea, but it feels like you're speaking with incredulity here? Deyan Sudjic's The Edifice Complex is a fun book about this. There's a reason the White House looks how it does, it's communicating something and it's asking certain behavioural norms from the people who step inside.
I'm not sure what architecture is being destroyed. Here in Europe such buildings are generally protected from significant redevelopment becaues they're rightly recognised as cultural heritage in and of themselves. Is this a real issue?
There is a fully saturated air of superiority in the arguments that you are making and defending. How can you and others take it for granted that people referred to as "many demographics" would at all feel at unease with serif fonts? That sounds 100% made up, because it is. It might be easier to just make up how other people are supposed to feel, instead of getting to know these strange "others", that are just like you.
Why not put yourself in the situation? Let's say you went to a foreign place from yours to visit an important public building. This can be a temple, palace, church, mosque, or even a serif-using museum. Would you find it reasonable to demand they change their architecture and their fonts for you to feel welcome? Would you agree with local custodians, if they argued that you don't have the capacity to appreciate the original style, or would you find it demeaning? Classical Roman style architecture is foreign to my culture, and I greatly appreciate when I can visit such a place, why in the world would I feel unwelcome? That would be like getting mad at the light fixtures.
> I think you know very well that serif fonts carry a sense of formality and even authority that sans fonts don't.
Not at all. Serif fonts are printed in novels, while sans serif fonts are used in forms from the tax office. But even if we entertain that idea, so what? Some places are formal, and every human has the capacity to behave formally and be in formal places – if they chose to.
> Which technocrats are these? > I'm not sure what architecture is being destroyed.
People who are professionals in city planning. I guess it's ordered differently everywhere under different names. They are technicians and they are making the decisions - hence technocrats. A ton of buildings were torn down during the 1900s to make room for brutalist shoeboxes. What's left is usually protected, as you mention.
I asked you not to do this, but you're continuing to do so and trying to justify it. I won't engage in this way. Any sense of superiority/inferiority or thought prescriptivism that you're sensing in what I'm saying is something you've projected onto me. I'm talking only about accessibility. This exchange has been bizarre.
Wow, now it looks like a logo for a contruction company or something, in cheap suburban billboards...
"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 …"
While the new logo feels very 2020's. Like they're trying to be contemporary, and actually make an effort to connect the art they show to people today, not to those people's parents. It looks like a place with a thought-provoking exhibition I might want to take a date to.
So I'm definitely going with the new logo.
https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/
You have to subscribe to read the articles now, but just looking at the thumbnails is fun enough
Browsing the before&after tag was especially enjoying: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/categor...
I found a nice counter example to the trend presented in the article: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...
My bad take: Modern architecture ugliness comes from architects using CAD with insufficient proficiency to create complex designs. Result: Mossty cubes and grids, with some advanced users adding fillets.
He did one project with it and roundfiled the whole thing because there was no art involved. He had become an architect specializing in high end custom homes because of the creativity involved. CAD killed that aspect.
I do not see why the same dynamics would apply to a logo/font, which surely have very little cost difference between any two.
It's increased homogenisation at every level.
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 simplicity of the brand (2). My UX designer even used them as an example to emulate (we disagreed on many things).
Also, designers, like most people, are inherently uncreative. A new trend will start, and people will follow. Just look at how every AI project has been trying to shoehorn "Q" into their names these past couple of weeks. Or how everything "smart" had to have a lower-case "i" in front of the brand for a long while. I'm starting to see the backlash against minimalism more frequently, hopefully it'll hit design schools soon and the next home run brand will move away from extremist minimalism
(1) https://thepointsguy.com/2018/02/lufthansa-new-livery-boring...
(2) https://www.adelahaye.com/blog/2020/2/11/feeling-blue-luftha...
AI is not the solution for making things more creative.
Neither are those designers. My point is, AI will make producing uncreative designs even cheaper, which in turn will make career in uncreative designs unprofitable, which means fewer uncreative designers.
Are you sure? I'd say for example here it shows creativity: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08433
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.
1) be as boring as possible so people can make sense of it quickly and efficiently in a world where there are countless other things competing for your time and attention
2) standout as much as possible to gain your attention in the aforementioned busy world
IME this explains a lot the nature of trends that design experiences.
99% of the time the designer has to do what the client instructs them to do. And in most cases, they will simply point to some recent change by the competition.
Also everybody will have an opinion about a design.
Reason I bring this up is the Southwest flag livery - which the MD one in particular really stands out.
What do you gain? Did everyone suddenly start thinking Google was new and fresh after they spent however many millions on their rebrand? And then there's the inherent contradiction. Is a logo important, if not why are you changing it, if it is, why are you throwing out the current valuable logo, or are you implicitly accepting you somehow failed and tainted the old logo?
All I see is a company bike shedding rather than spending the money and effort to improve their offering.
It took 3 months for the logo to launch. I was ready. I left. They cashed out my Angel options at the Series B price. It crashed and burned about 1 year later. I still believe I was the only person to make money from that startup
Part of branding is fashion. What is current fashion looks outdated and old and, well, out-of-fashion after a few years.
So what you gain is that you continue to look modern and current and up-to-date, rather than looking old and fuddy-duddy and out-of-touch.
> Is a logo important, if not why are you changing it
Because it's important to keep it looking good, part of which is keeping it up-to-date.
> why are you throwing out the current valuable logo
Because it loses value over time as it starts to look old-fashioned
> or are you implicitly accepting you somehow failed and tainted the old logo
I don't know what that means. Logos go out of style not because of anything you did, there's no "tainting". It's just how fashions change
Further, why should a logo even be fashionable? Sure if I get this week's fashionable hair cut it'll be out of fashion next week. So why get the fashionable haircut to start with.
To extend this further, presumably tech companies want to communicate that they are ahead of everyone else. If so why are they following the fashion. If you change your logo to be fashionable today, your communicating that you're a follower, not a leader.
All companies make grand statements about what logos are supposed to do and represent, but then they change the logo, which you can't really infer anything good from if you take those statements at face value.
Why do people fall in love? It's just human psychology.
> Further, why should a logo even be fashionable?
Because it's aesthetic, and aesthetics follow fashion. Again, it's just human psychology. It's what people like.
> Sure if I get this week's fashionable hair cut it'll be out of fashion next week.
The fashions we're talking about last for years, not days. Think 70's hairstyles vs. 80's hairstyles. You'd keep your hairstyle for many years, same as a logo lasts for many years.
> So why get the fashionable haircut to start with.
So you look good and have aesthetic appeal. So people want to date you, and in the business analogy, people want to buy your products.
> To extend this further, presumably tech companies want to communicate that they are ahead of everyone else.
No, they want to communicate that they're up-to-date and the right solution for you.
> If so why are they following the fashion.
Because that shows they're up-to-date.
> If you change your logo to be fashionable today, your communicating that you're a follower, not a leader.
Who said anything about being a leader? Yes, of course you want to follow the fashion. That shows you're up-to-date. The question isn't about being a follower vs. a leader, the question is about being up-to-date vs. being out-of-date. Being out-of-date is a bad look for any company. You want to be up-to-date.
> All companies make grand statements about what logos are supposed to do and represent, but then they change the logo, which you can't really infer anything good from if you take those statements at face value.
Sometimes the new logo is a new way of representing the "grand statements" but simply updated for the current fashion, reflected in the current design language. So you absolutely can infer that they're staying true to their values.
On the other hand, sometimes company values and priorities and "grand statements" change, because the older ones aren't right anymore. In which case a new logo can reflect those changes too.
In both cases, what you can infer is going to be valuable if they did a good job with the logo.
Hope this all makes sense.
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.
In other words: the only thing that’s new with the current cycle is that it’s a minimal cycle, making a lot of designs converge. I’m sure we’ll see a larger variety of designs with the next cycle, underlying design philosophy permitting.
In other words: "what are you paying all these designers for, if you aren't going to have them match the latest trends?"
The most ironic thing of all is that the author of this article has built a platform – one of many – that has sucked all deliberation and concept and creativity out of the branding process.
The Fiverrification of identity creation.
Before: let's commission a designer to make a cool logo / let's make a cool logo.
Now: market research data indicates that 90% of sales went to people who used this font style in their logo so let's commission a designer to make us a logo that looks like everyone else's [1]
[1] with no consideration of the fact that 99% of sellers use that font type in their logo and 85% sales went to market leader who definitely used that font type in their logo, to say nothing of the fact that the logo probably didn't secure the conversion in any cases
The original logo correctly reflects that von is not capitalized, that von is part of "von Furstenburg", and that there is no hidden word between "Diane" and "von Furstenburg". The new logo does none of those things. Who puts a caesura in the middle of a word?
Every website was white with black text on it. Web "design" seemed limited to picking which color should links be. When you notice this, you start seeing it everywhere. Every article just looks exactly the same. They were all forgettable and devoid of personality. It seemed as if branding didn't reach the content of the article and was just a crown worn on top of the content, literally, at the header.
Good.
> They were all forgettable and devoid of personality
Are you similarly upset that books are so "devoid of personality"?
The work of a book designer differs essentially from that of a graphic artist. While the latter is constantly searching for new means of expression, driven at the very least by his desire for a "personal style", a book designer has to be the loyal and tactful servant of the written word. It is his job to create a manner of presentation whose form neither overshadows nor patronizes the content [... whereas] work of the graphic artist must correspond to the needs of the day and, other than in collections, seldom lives on for any length of time[...] The aim of the graphic artist is self-expression, while the responsible book designer, conscious of his obligation, divests himself of this ambition. Book design is no field for those who desire to mint the style of today or to create something. --Tschichold, on the form of the book
We should be so lucky if web designers grew up and subordinated their impulses—of imparting their (eventually unfashionable) "personal styles"—to their duty to serve the page and the content the way that it is done with books.
Then it became a game of pointy-headed middle-managers having meetings in the boardroom and micro-managing the creatives.. "our competitors wet their pants, so we have to as well in order to not appear behind the times.."
That's an inherent problem with the system.. even if something works and is comfortable for people to use and they're happy with it, you still have some middle-manager screaming at subject matter experts that they need to innovate because the system is based on creating artificial value for "the shareholders". So you end up with dubious changes like Google Maps recently deciding that they would change their colour palette to a "cold tone". Why? Did anyone ask for more blue and green and gray, or is this just more artificed "innovation for the shareholders"?
Wasn’t it the 1920s when sans serif typefaces became a major fad?
https://www.creativebloq.com/news/logos-look-the-same
It's definitely a trend.
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-m...
Since its publication it even got featured in a Spanish textbook, and I get tons of traffic to it all the time. The topic seems very much valid for the last few years, with no sign of change.
The main reason seems to be to look good (or even readable) on mobile, but it seems that it's more of a bandwagon than a proven good strategy.
I much prefer the serif with warm colors for various elements. But the people I might work with strongly prefer the sans-serif with white and black and bold and bright accent colors.
https://twitter.com/ucllc/status/1622979476899393536
So, hopefully the identical logo trend has peaked.
Same culture, products, pricing models
The logo is just a result of that
- logos - cars - architecture - even personal appearance
Many logos use cursive or letters which one must "focus" in order to read.
But if you use a "simple font" you asap read it without even knowing.
If you want to get the most out of your ads you need the people to actually register the ad message instantly.
I wonder if you could get ahead of the curve and use fonts like Garamond in the old Apple ads. Maybe that would be considered avantgarde soon?
I'm not sure 20th century typographic practice ever especially favored serifs for display (e.g. headline) use.
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.
The new logos make me think -- oh, maybe they're actually doing something cool and relevant today, and not stuck in outdated ideas of luxury that include full sets of china and silver and mink coats.
We truly are lost.
I don't see what's so "lost" about that. It's certainly not the type of luxury vibe that seems to speak to anything desirable today. The logos look like something out of a museum.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
(And at least an iPhone does a lot more than a Rolex, and is a heckuva lot cheaper too. So I see this as a major improvement, actually.)
Also nevau rich shit
OK, so we haven't fallen at all. That was my point.