I used to do a lot of logo design, some for the replacement of time-honored logos even. Spicy jobs those were, both on pro and con sides!
One thing I learned was that new, individual, and fresh leadership psychology often brings new logos into being. Differentials in psychology can't help but expose new perspectives on organizational concepts. And that's what a logo is, a conceptual organization pointing to a new or updated organizational concept! :-)
Some of those fresh perspectives are normal elsewhere, but have been ignored in a given organization for so long that they seem prophetic when a leader considers them. And so sometimes even the doomed new logos I saw developed were like prophets sent from on high. They might not have been well-loved, they might not have lasted 5 years, but they meant something, and it was often a big something.
In my experience, when the new Director of Whatever deemed that the amazing old woodcut logo had to go, it wasn't usually that this individual hated history and tradition. It was their expression of an obvious need for a new concept.
To the outside world, the need for radical change is not always as obvious as it is to even just a small set of insiders, people who have developed what you might call "woodcut PTSD," along with some damn good ideas for how the org needs to change, and soon.
So, to me--no opinion on the graphical look, since it's often a red herring in a bunch of ways. But some big "!" interest in the individuals and perspectives behind the scenes, due to the nature of the change.
(Also, seeing people redesigning the new logo to much applause is kind of a cringe. Again a big risk here is that they are unwittingly reconnecting a really unhealthy feedback loop, based on assumptions from an outsider's perspective/demand on the organization.)
> One thing I learned was that new, individual, and fresh leadership psychology often brings new logos into being
Could it be that new leaders feel they have to demonstrate they're in change, and initiating a logo replacement is unfortunately much easier than doing something that is genuinely positive for stakeholders and shareholders?
You mean you think that's the main reason for any given logo change, or one of many possible reasons?
While not outside of the realm of possibility, it's actually rare to see that kind of thought process play out in practice of working with businesses & NPOs on their logos.
Much more common is that there is a base of support for change from above, outside, and below.
Maybe related to the fact that "I changed our logo to suit myself" isn't broadly seen as a masterstroke in objective leadership practice.
> there is a base of support for change from above, outside, and below
I'm sorry, I have no idea what that statement actually means.
How do you quantify "a base support for change"? Would you ask staff if they'd prefer a pay rise ... or for that money to be spent on a new logo? Would you ask customers if they're prefer improved products ... or a new logo?
There is a reason I wrote "initiating a logo replacement". If a new-in-the-job boss pitches up in a meeting and announces "I think our logo is old. I think we need a new, fresh, relevant, inclusive logo", then who do you suppose is going to tell them they're wrong? The yes-crowd of middle managers just nod and agree. And there's your logo replacement process started.
No need for data, no need for any actual reasons to do something, just someone new in the neighbourhood marking their patch, like a dog at a lamppost.
Let’s follow your hint. The CEO of OUP is trying [https://www.thebookseller.com/news/oup-rebrands-it-becomes-d...] to effect a transformation to digital distribution and digital “tools and resources” which I assume means going beyond digital versions of books and journals.
So yeah, the coat-of-arms/bookplate format of the old logo is not where he’s headed.
Absent from the OP is consideration of the new logo on its own terms. I get an O for Oxford, the turning pages, and hint of a Möbius strip. It works for me.
On the other hand, the translation of the Latin on the old motto is “the Lord is my light,” paired with the crowns invoking royal fiat. Traditional, yes, but…
Another signal in the new logo may be a declaration of independence from the University of Oxford itself, because the old logo was just the University’s coat of arms.
To be fair, "Oxford" begins with "O", and, as far as contemporary/flat ring logos go, this is one of the better examples I've seen. It is an attractive logo, even if the ethos of the previous logo is lost.
Also a ring == a circle, and organizations are looking to circular-philosophy holistic changes as a broad change since roughly the start of the century.
Circles are _the_ graphical element/symbol of holistic energy with few others coming close.
Generally when I see a move to a circular logo in a new design brief it's a sign that the organization perceives that it must quickly heal from damage/protect itself from danger and put some aspects of the past behind. It is usually attempting to build capacity for a new direction as well. IMO this is usually not a fully conscious decision by the team.
Not worse then the TFA. IMO the other side of the arguing is easier: instead of the merits of the new logo, we can agree that the old logo is just not compatible with something that is modern or inclusive, and it had to go.
What about: if they want to signal modernness and inclusiveness (regardless whether they actually want to be modern and inclusive) they had to get rid of the logo?
That it sounds like mumbo jumbo is no surprise at all and kinda normal given the circumstances.
First, tech communities are not exactly known for deep visual design-theory interest or background (for example, what's your personal experience level with logo design? This would inform both a tendency to radically re-summarize using the word "just", and a tendency to relate the description in nonsensical terms; it's a matter of education depth).
Also, I used to lecture college students on this stuff at length, so it's kind of plain ol' design thinking to me, from theory/psychology to application.
And then, a lot of people also call tech talk mumbo jumbo. For related reasons I don't really feel the need to justify or bring it down to earth any more than I'd try to do that with the Linux kernel in a random "kernel? sounds like mumbo jumbo" discussion.
But as always, in the right context the theory-practice connection provides leverage that can't be had elsewhere.
PS there are some absolutely great examples of this thinking if you are willing to empty the cup and explore the foundations. See the "In popular culture" section here as one possible point of departure:
Personally, I find it deeply unattractive, especially because of the way the solid part breaks at the top to leave room for the bizarre striped part of the O (whereas in the lower part, it looks much better, giving both some sense of perspective and a beautiful continuous shape).
That's the main problem in my mind... another ring. The article even mentions that the look is rather similar to at least three others. The most obvious being the Obama campaign logo.
I can sort of see why they'd want to move away from the old logo, it hard to reproduce in various sizes, honestly not that unique either, it looks like any other very old logo and you'd have to know that it's Oxford University Press to recognize the logo.
The new one share the last problem: You need to know that it's the OUP ring logo and not one of the other 100 logos that looks just like it.
What I find to be an issue with many modern logos is that I don't see how they are expected to age. It seems more likely that they'll tossed aside completely in 10 to 20 years, for yet another redesign.
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.
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 probably good for a few seconds of confusion on the part of people who see the logo and don't recognize it because it looks like a zillion other logos and has no continuity with the old logo.
So no big deal.
Although. There is Steve Jobs line. Where's he's trying to get engineers on the original Mac to eek out just a slight faster boot. We're going to sell 100 million of these things, can you make it boot 25 seconds faster? If you do that will save cumulatively 90 years worth of time. That's a human life. Can you save a human life!
I mean it's dumb and maybe funny but a minor annoyance over a long enough time and enough people could be worth complaining about.
> 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 distinguished by a numerically unique RGB value.
Their old logo was much better, since it harkens back to a literal coat of arms, which isn't something you see every day.
Undoubtedly influenced by Oxford and Cambridge but it's a design style adopted by so many universities it's practically generic for 'some sort of university thing logo'. I don't have strong feelings about the new logo either way but the idea the old one is some distinctive masterpiece seems misplaced.
When you’re one of the oldest universities in the world though, I think sticking with the old logo conveys a subtle gravitas and confidence in your legacy, much more than constant rebranding that says “look at me”.
I'm not sure it's obvious it conveys anything beside 'looks like everyone else'.
It's like the GP comment complaining about 'modernist, minimalist crap, indistinguishable from all the other modernist, minimalist crap' never ran across one of the most recognizable university press marks out there:
> a literal coat of arms, which isn't something you see every day
Except that a coat of arms has got to be THE most common logo for anything university related. I don't like the new one at all, but if you'd showed me the old one and asked me what it was for I'd have had no idea. Not memorable or recognizable at all, even if it is their coat of arms.
Presumably the people at OUP do care, because they actually paid for it. That's the author's point: if you are trying to signal something with a rebrand, how about putting the money into the actual thing instead of going through a pointless rebranding exercise and losing your identity in the process?
I care. I own a number of Oxford press books. The old logo says to me “serious, distinguished, trustworthy, academic, has been around long enough to be taken seriously, etc.”
It's lost history. The Latin text on the old logo connects the present with the past. There would have been thousands of instances where people would have thought "what does that mean" and have a browse through history.
That history represents 400 years of colonialism. Latin represents classism and racism and denies the history of billions of marginalized peoples.
Thus, it must change because the purpose of a university is not to retain cultures and histories when no one else cares, it's not to improve the mental capabilities of the students.
It purpose instead is to pursue equity in 2 senses: no especially talented people of the wrong* parents are allowed to gain inordinate skills and the foundation makes gobs of money.
(*) Determination of wrongness changes over time, and the adage "2 wrongs don't make a right" is considered tomfoolery.
> That history represents 400 years of colonialism. Latin represents classism and racism and denies the history of billions of marginalized peoples.
Do the marginalised peoples include the native Britons who were conquered by the Romans? Or is there a cut off point in your view of history? If the now native Britons, like me, want to retain links to the past, then should that be disallowed?
I like the Latin inscription, as it keeps a connection with the past. Good and bad, it is history I want to be connected to. I find the idea that it needs to be airbrushed bizarre, and the idea that Latin is solely a tool of "oppression" a complete misreading of history.
> That iconic beauty and excellence was the province of rich white dudes—and can only be expanded by lowering our standards. And what a load of horseshit that is.
This feels like a stretch. And almost breaks what little interest I have here. :(
Also, why do folks always impart way more significance to logo/label than makes sense? I can get the desire to want to change. That is natural. The idea that all changes matter is silly, though. Especially to the degree this one will be talked about. Probably less vitriol and energy is put into the literal buildings of the institute.
> Also, why do folks always impart way more significance to logo/label than makes sense?
I'm not sure we can imply importance from the volume of communication; perhaps the opposite. After colors and names, logos/icons are probably the third easiest thing to bikeshed.
Fair. I just also view it as one of the easiest things to just accept and move on from. Especially since it would be relatively easy to just change again later.
In fact, I would fully support any organization I'm in having a change most every year. I do appreciate the connection to the past and something old that many get from it. That said, it is easy to metaphorically make that connection by acknowledging what came before. The control and autonomy that you give to the next generations feels way more important.
If you are a dev, than you probably miss the extend of in which branding can have an effect. Sure, from some practical viewpoint nothing changes. But consider a logo part of a language, a culture, a visual statement. In design, it’s what we do
In this case Oxford Press changed an iconic statement with a stupid generic say-nothing that could be a tire or a bagel company.
Think of it like a banner of an army. You don’t want stand behind a banner that says “I am with stupid”
It’s hard to convey to non design folk, but design does have an impact, even if it doesn’t bring world peace, it’s culturally significant.
I mean, I get it. In that you can tell me and I can feel a little swayed by your argument.
What I don't get, is the odd idea that there is a universal iconography that every should agree with. For one, I don't find this rebranding that much worse than the old one. I actually assumed both icons on the first tweet were the new thing, as I easily think both are kind of bleh.
Finally, though, some nitpicks. Military banners are incredibly silly looking. Flags? The same. Usually with much simpler aesthetics that rely more on overall color than they do any iconography.
And saying it "could be a tire or a bagel company" is also idiotically offensive. What is wrong with tire and bagel companies? This betrays a sense of class belief that is hilarious when juxtaposed with many of the criticisms given. (Specifically, the old class having the better icon.)
I get while you think it’s offensive, but that’s not intentional. It’s more that if you hold your hand on the words and you see only the circle logo you get different ideas of what this brand might be.
Pretty sure a lot of people would answer “tyre company” or “gear manufacturer” or something. So it does not communicate well.
About the banner nitpick, banners needed to be seen from afar, during chaotic scenes, so were often quite easy to distinguish from afar :)
I challenge this assertion. For one, I bet most folks have no clue what standard tire branding looks like. Indeed, https://www.carlogos.org/tire-brands/ shows that most of them do /not/ have circles on them.
My nitpick on the banners was more that the iconography of them was not at all key in folks building an identity with them. I should have expanded and said it wasn't the banner that builds the identity. Rather, it is more likely the shared identity that builds the love of the banner.
> If you are a dev, than you probably miss the extend of in which branding can have an effect
I think the inverse is true: being in visual design means branding matters to you. Just as audio engineers wince at imperfections that no one else even hears.
And even that is probably more measurable than this; the people that came up with the new one are also "in design". Now you might say to that that it's different, because they were getting paid. But everyone in design is getting paid for design, so it's unsurprising they'd want to all talk about how important design is. But if you can only convince other designers, then that's a bit telling.
I mean, I like good product design as much as the next person. But it's extremely easy to overstate its importance.
I really can’t comment on the designers idea, but it really depends on the agency and the workflow.
Sometimes you have these crazy stages in the design process where the client choses the design by committee, and you get the blandest dullest compromise of them all. This looks a bit like that. This logo certainly feels like that.
There are a lot of schools in design, but it doesn’t mean there are no criteria. It really depends on who made this, how it was made and so on.
I feel design really fits into our and any culture. Think of iconic designs like coca cola, or nike, or apple. Also everything you own is probably designed at some point. Yeah maybe it’s not “world peace” significant, but culturally it is, it’s a social phenomenon.
There's some fine (not great, just ... acceptable) ideas in the new logo, but it's pretty sloppy for an institution of this stature. A few things I could point to that are probably subjective, but objectively the kerning desperately needs attention.
The kerning doesn't look terrible to me. The exception that stands out is the whitespace between the OX and XF pairs, which is optically a bit unbalanced.
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 Nortel Networks—I do still love that globemark!—and the 2015 sans-serif Google logo which has become so ubiquitous as to make the previous serif version look weirdly quaint. But I liked neither of those at the time they were unveiled.)
Am I just a stick in the mud? Can you point out some rebrands that have been so wildly popular that I might begrudgingly admit that I actually liked them?
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 important to the success/failure of the game they are building.
The MIT Press had an amusing amount of thought that went into their logo. But... I would wager the vast majority of folks just don't see it.
Reminds me of that parody pepsi logo document. (At least, I think it was a parody?)
> 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_.
The last one is particularly hilarious, because I attended the University of Waterloo in the late 1990s when they rebranded from a crest even older than the one shown as "original". In fact, that older crest looked just like the "final" crest. I'm glad they've finally brought it back; pity it took more than a decade to rectify the error.
> Reminds me of that parody pepsi logo document. (At least, I think it was a parody?)
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?)
I own quite a lot of GAP clothing—mostly trousers bought second-hand on eBay since they stopped carrying the design I liked—and none of what I have had has ever had a logo other than on the label.
> The original "Federal Express" logo wasn't bad, but FEDEX rocks it hard.
I will give you this one, but…
> Some of the old LEGO logos aren't great…
True, but in the context of my original question, I don't think it's reasonable for me to have an opinion about rebrands that occurred before I became aware of the brand, and LEGO has been using the same logo since I got set 20 in 1977.
I _do_ vaguely recall the old Federal Express slanty logo, but I must admit I don't remember the rebrand _as such_, so I'm not sure how much I can count this one. But yes: a good example of a definite win as far as rebrands go.
I actually liked the Windows rebrand with Windows 8. It’s simpler, cleaner, still recognizable, works as mono or dual tone, and actually looks like the namesake of the product.
Most previous versions were complicated messes. Windows 7 was I think the best version of the four color version.
The transition from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 is the greatest leap in the Windows product line for me (including design).
I remember seeing the '95 start-up screen and its new UI for the first time - I was quite amazed by how much better it looked (I was at an impressionable age back then).
The Windows 95 logo always felt unsettling to me. At least part of it is because the main part of the logo curves downwards in a sad/frowning sort of way.
This is the ultimate example of a _terrible_ rebrand, in my opinion. I _loved_ the colourful logo, and I think that getting rid of it was the ultimate travesty. (At least the flat black Apple is better than those terrible shiny ones, though.)
I do wonder if I'd have liked it if I'd previously been familiar with the original woodcut logo, though.
Interesting. The rainbow logo (which I grew up with - I had (still have!) an Apple ][) has way too much of an Atari 2600 breakout vibe to me today. I find it looks really dated.
(I don't know about wildly popular, but) I remember linking the older UPS logo (with the string-tied box on top, designed by Paul Rand, who also made the IBM and NeXT logos, and lots more), and thought the new logo was sort of dumb, but now I appreciate its simplicity.
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.
Yes. But it's normal. People who weren't involved in the project, or don't know design, very commonly have strong negative reactions to a company they know rebranding. I don't know why.
Come next year you'll have either completely forgotten about this, or have no opinion at all.
> Come next year you'll have either completely forgotten about this, or have no opinion at all.
I doubt it. There are still so many rebrands / logo changes that I get angry thinking about. Off the top of my head (in addition to the ones mentioned in my replies to other comments in this thread):
- Meta. It just confirmed what I already knew but had been desperately denying: Facebook is dead.
- The new, nearly indistinguishable multi-coloured Google Apps icons. (Were _no_ UX researchers involved in this decision?)
- Apple imposing the squirkle on macOS icons. (My laptop is not a tablet!)
- Google imposing the white circle on Android app icons. (Phone icons were already small enough before they were shrunk so as to fit into the stupid circles!)
- The new Slack logo.
- Instagram ditching their original camera logo/icon for that god-awful squirkly gradient monstrosity. (The day I saw that was the day I knew I would _never_ install their app on my phone.)
- American Airlines dropping their previous Vignelli-designed logo (and Helvetica).
- The London 2012 Olympics logo (the pink monstrosity described as "Lisa Simpson giving Bart a blow job") that replacing the London 2012 bid logo (with ribbons in the Olympics colours forming the shape of the river Thames).
That goes back at least 15 years. I have a long memory and hold grudges, at least when it comes to awful rebrandings.
InstaCart: https://www.wolffolins.com/case-study/instacart
Pretty recent, tech company, not a beloved brand at the time of rebrand, but wow it's a great rebrand. Way more character, way more fun.
Leibniz: https://auge-design.com/work/leibniz-design-relaunch/
Subtle changes, embraces the character, modernizes the packaging, makes a consistent design system. Maybe not what you're looking for, but still a cool example of new design done well and embraced.
Midi: https://www.pentagram.com/work/midi/story
Really interesting supporting logos and graphics. Maybe a little too heavily minimalist, but man that's a cool idea to have a dynamic icon for your logo!
These are some bigger names, but honestly the really interesting stuff is inside smaller companies who don't have to worry so much about legacy. There's some beautiful, character filled work out there.
I like this one. Not spotted the new logo in the UK yet, but it would definitely make me less determined to avoid the company's restaurants.
> InstaCart
I'm not really familiar with this company so I don't really have any feelings about the rebrand per se. I do like the new logo, which is clever—but after looking up what it used to look like I can say I prefer the aesthetics of the original.
> Leibniz
Again a brand I'm not familiar with. Fair point about the consistent design system, but again I prefer the original logo.
> New York State Parks.
Again not one I'm familiar with, but here I can say I LOVE the new logo: who can not love it when an organisation makes it so obvious they wish they were Canadian?
> CNET
This one I definitely was familiar with. Hadn't seen the new branding. My reaction is "looks weird; those letters make me feel uncomfortable".
> Midi
WTF. The new logo is cool in and of itself, but this rebranding makes me actively angry:
- The MIDI logo has been used as a symbol to identify connectors for decades. Changing it will cause unnecessary confusion.
- The important feature of MIDI is that it is _digital_, but the new logo is all about _analog_ waveforms.
- It's also stupidly confusing. Literally the first thought that passed through my mind when I saw the new logo is "did the MIDI organisation get bought by Meta??"
> Mojang
I'll give you this one. The new logo is pretty bad, but the original was _awful_.
> DK
I am literally* crying. (* not literally).
> These are some bigger names, but honestly the really interesting stuff is inside smaller companies who don't have to worry so much about legacy.
I think this raises an important point. Smaller companies without much history do not destroy much when they throw their old branding away. Bigger, older companies do.
I found the Met's rebrand interesting to consider.
I am on the younger side/moved to New York recently. Without knowing the history of the Met logo I have always found the (new) logo fairly iconic- the stickers visitors wear, and the various paraphernalia with the logo look good to me. I find it clean and sharp. I think I actually prefer it to the old logo (which I do not remember seeing before today)
I like it because it adapted its image to its nickname. "The Metropolitan Museum of Art" is the museum's full name - embracing "The Met" formally is a nice, humanizing touch.
As a tourist, I prefer the full name. I never knew what "the Met" was until know. It clearly stands for Metropolitan. But Metropolitan what? Police? Works? The full name is much more accessible and less intimidating.
It's interesting because there also are The Mets. So you have the Met and the Mets, but nobody familiar with both would ever think of the other when hearing either.
It confuses me. There's also the Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan Club, the Metropolitan Life Insurance company and probably a dozen more. At least the baseball team, the NY Mets, is plural.
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
Even in Britain, the context will clear it up straight away. Humans are, theoretically at least, very good at dealing with ambiguity. I'm hard pressed to think of a conversation where context clues wouldn't either make it abundantly clear, or prompt further questions about, which "Met" one is talking about, between a world famous art gallery and the police head quarters probably more famously known by another name.
Would this conversation ever happen?
I'm going on holiday to New York City. I'm going to the Met to check out their impressionist paintings.
Oh, they turned Scotland Yard into an art gallery now?
I'm applying for a job at/in (the only tiny difference) the met
Nevermind all the sentences you could come up with where the context is revealed only later, so yes you immediately realise you had it wrong, but you had it wrong.
It's not really about 'people will be confused' anyway, I just mean it's bad brand awareness, it weakens the identity.
The only example I can think of with a strong brand for a generic name is Apple.
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.
London has the Underground. Something that sounds generic actually is well known to the locals and is part of the culture, the identity, the attraction of a place. Same story here.
As a non-local, when I hear "tube" I think toothpaste, swimming and repairing tire punctures. Mass transit may not even be in my top 5 - and that's fine.
Human language ambiguity and locals have their shibboleths - we don't have to optimize for tourists.
Oh! To be honest I'm not actually sure what we call those ('pool inflatables' is all I can think of, somewhat generic) but I don't think it's tubes/inner tubes.
The equivalent (similarly generic) name is 'the tube' as sibling commenter points out, which Transport for London doesn't use as far as I'm aware, but even if they did, they don't have the same goals as far as I'm aware.
One might think it'd be similarly aiming to capture the hearts and minds of tourists, but TfL's been so aggressively pro-Oyster, then/now contactless, that afaict it's always been just about as hard as possible for tourists while still being convenient for Londoners. It makes some sort of sense, it's subsidised by the London taxpayer after all - so it is 'by Londoners for Londoners' - but I think surely it would be possible simultaneously to make it easier for and capture more money from tourists. I digress - point was I think to be that TfL doesn't really care about brand, especially not globally. Maybe I'm wrong to assume that 'the met' does.
Similar frustration with Vegas: The have Caesar's Palace, which is a long walk from Caesar's Forum. And on top of that, Caesar's Palace also has a food court/shopping center inside it that they call ... The Forum. Facepalm.
People fear change and cling to nostalgia. That's part of it. Another thing is people identify themselves with brands, so when the brand changes, it's like a part of them changes, without their input or consent (!!). That you've never known the old logo frees you from these constraints.
I try not to care about corporate logos too much, but I have to say I was little betrayed when my football team changed their typeface from a unique font to a more generic one, because I feel that represents me and my city (even moreso than my city's local museum, whose new logo I don't prefer, but I don't let it get to me).
As someone who never saw the old or the new logo before today, the old logo looks ugly and forgettable to me. If you gave me $1000 a week from now, I don’t think I can recall what organization that logo belongs to
I don't like it as it seems to remind me of the James Bond intro. But it seems most (or at least a large fraction) of people don't really like rebrands. So it probably doesn't really matter (unless unreasonable amount of money was spent on
rebranding).
Even then it still doesn't matter. Anyone who spends an unreasonable amount of money on rebranding probably has a far more unreasonable amount of money remaining afterwards.
In this case I kinda care if too much money was spent on rebranding, because OUP publishes science books and journals, so I don't really want pay extra of page charges for that...
A big advantage of the new logo is that it can also serve as a recognizable (in time) letter mark, without needing to write out “Oxford University Press”.
Whereas with the previous logo that’s not possible.
Indeed. I can also see their new logo scaling a lot better. The new logo would become fairly unrecognisable, especially at smaller sizes.
I'm a bit mixed about them moving to a sans-serif font, even as someone who usually prefers them, as I find for printed word serif can look rather wonderful but it's hardly the baddest of sins.
I assume this logo is going on the spines of books.
This means that you are taking a recognizable easy to spot image that says: 'this book is vetted and serious, trust it like you trust us', and replacing it with a logo that is less recognizable (and by my prediction won't be around in 100 years). For anyone who browses shelves this will, in fact, reduce utility.
I remember when SGI (Silicon Graphics) paid a bunch of money to rebrand to . . . drumroll . . . SGI!
The consultants must have been high-fiving each other after that one landed, it's like trading in your car only to find that the saleswoman has sold you your own car back, at a profit.
(SGI later collapsed due to "Corporate Campus Syndrome", and other companies, including Google, now occupy the wacky buildings they spent even more money on. It's kind of like a higher order of hermit crab).
TIL Google occupies SGI's former headquarters. A college professor mentioned working for SGI, so I knew they existed and had importance, but I didn't realize their business had collapsed.
The workstation market got undercut by the improving performance of intel PCs with accelerators from companies like 3D Labs. There's plenty you could criticize SGI management for, but all the unix workstation vendors ended up getting pushed out by that in the end. SGI continued on for a bit selling supercomputers, as they had some multiprocessor interconnect technology that was good for its time. But that got spun out as SGI died, and is now the Cray division of HP.
It's sad what happened to them, as in their prime they really were a category of their own.
SGI had some seriously cool tech that they could charge a premium for, then $300 3D graphics cards for PCs came out and ate their lunch (around the time that Windows NT was basically destroying the Unix workstation market).
I remember sneaking over to their cafeteria, from the Landings office park across the street (where I did stints at some startups). They didn't bother to check badges. I met up with a bunch of old cow-orkers from Apple and just kind of hemmed and hawed when they asked what group I was in. :-)
But the lessons are clear: Watch your competitors carefully, and don't build a stupid corporate campus because the gods simply hate that kind of hubris.
They were one of the contenders in the early days of the web as everyone was trying to get bigger web servers, rather than numerous commodity web servers that we have today.
They built single big machines and gave away the best swag. The leather jacket, in particular, was coveted.
The reason I'm not allowed in polite circles is after they present those 3 options, I'd laugh, compliment the great joke and ask them when the real presentation was going to begin.
Always got to watch those acronyms. Reminds me of back in the day when Oregon State started advertising its website on billboards. www.orst.edu. [1] Nobody in their marketing department managed to see that before the rest of the world quickly started making fun of it. They quickly rebranded to www.oregonstate.edu.
Yeah, so a couple years back the "Technische Universität Berlin" rebranded to "Berlin Universität der Technologie" or Berlin University of Technology. Because they thought that would be more similar to e.g. MIT and the like. Of course the abbreviation then would be BUT... Thankfully it did not stick and they are back to Technical University of Berlin.
Usually a logo/rebrand change keeps the name. So no real suprise.
That said, SGI had an iconic logo of a cube formed from a single periodic pipe before.
I was using SGIs daily at the time and I almost cried when they did the rebrand.
The rebrand replaced it with a contemporary (at the time, mind you) typography logo that would look outdated if the compamy still existed.
To their credit, the rebrand did include a typeface design for use with all their design, i.e. detached from the logo.
The resp. fonts would have the aforementioned issues though -- one variant was used for the logo which is kinda cheap.
But at least they had a tyepface designed and it was recognizable. That rarely happens. Commonly a rebrand will just swap the old typeface for something different but already existing.
Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky. It also would have been expensive to reproduce well on letterhead, and I wouldn’t dare think of how that looked on photocopies (often monochrome at the time)
Now, could they have stylized/simplified the old logo and keep it nice? I wouldn’t know.
> Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky.
Now this is just silly. By 1999 most web users had at least True Color displays at SVGA if not XGA. While VGA resolutions with 256 colors were a design consideration those users were not the norm.
With that said, the old SGI looked just fine even at 256 colors. The shape was distinctive and it was all grayscale so 256 color palettes had all the colors needed for the logo with little noticeable dithering. There were even good 1-bit versions that were very distinctive.
As others said: a good logo is always also good in black and white.
The old SGI logo was cast in plastic as a 2.5D version on the workstations, color printed in color brochures and otherwise there was a much simplified black and white version.
Monitors used by people who cared about SGI or did anything with graphics design we're at least 800x600. And the screens my company had at the time were all 1024x768 already (including the screen of our single SGI Iris Indigo).
I find it so fascinating using that people actually care about shit like this. Like when I saw the logo I had literally 0 thoughts about it. Whatever. It's a logo. Who cares. But then here's a guy who feels compelled to write a whole article about it and a thread full of people discussing it. Blows my mind.
Not to demean anyone like it's cool that this matters to people I just cannot even remotely understand it.
Fun story, I worked at (unnamed fortune 500 company) a while back, and they paid a consulting company something like 10 million to evaluate and suggest changes to the company's job titles. Not the actual jobs. Just the titles.
So I went from : associate (generic engineer role) to (generic engineer role) I.
I remember thinking this way when I was in undergrad. I wrote off branding, advertising, and marketing in general, naively thinking I understood those things because I didn't buy most products I saw in ads. I wasn't self-aware enough to recognize that, when in bookstores, I would gravitate to books with the "MIT Press" name or modernist logo, or the O'Reilly branding, or Harvard's Veritas shield. I'm sure there are books I only thumbed through because of some visual signal (besides the title) that made me feel "that university has probably been around for a while, so they've probably figured out how to deliver what the title promises".
Extremely generic logos don't offer distinction, and it's a bad idea for a strong brand to not clearly signal that brand in their products and marketing, especially in fields where there are many competitors (ie elite higher education).
If I am in a bookstore, the chances are that NYRB Classics volumes will catch my eye (if the store has them). The series has brought back into print a number of worthwhile books that were hard to find, it has come up with some excellent items that weren't previously out there (that I know--I'm thinking of The Jeffersonian Transformation). The logo is a small part of the "trade dress" (if I have the term right), but the trade dress of a good publisher is an asset.
I always love reading the angry rants from people who get angry about any change in an organisation's branding. Every single time. Absolutely every time there's a logo change, you can see the hoard of pointless blog posts coming over the hill.
And they always fail to understand what actually happens in design, what it's actually for.
I haven't considered context or reputation or brand continuity - but the article seems to be claiming it's intrinsically bad and that feels like hyperbole.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadI used to do a lot of logo design, some for the replacement of time-honored logos even. Spicy jobs those were, both on pro and con sides!
One thing I learned was that new, individual, and fresh leadership psychology often brings new logos into being. Differentials in psychology can't help but expose new perspectives on organizational concepts. And that's what a logo is, a conceptual organization pointing to a new or updated organizational concept! :-)
Some of those fresh perspectives are normal elsewhere, but have been ignored in a given organization for so long that they seem prophetic when a leader considers them. And so sometimes even the doomed new logos I saw developed were like prophets sent from on high. They might not have been well-loved, they might not have lasted 5 years, but they meant something, and it was often a big something.
In my experience, when the new Director of Whatever deemed that the amazing old woodcut logo had to go, it wasn't usually that this individual hated history and tradition. It was their expression of an obvious need for a new concept.
To the outside world, the need for radical change is not always as obvious as it is to even just a small set of insiders, people who have developed what you might call "woodcut PTSD," along with some damn good ideas for how the org needs to change, and soon.
So, to me--no opinion on the graphical look, since it's often a red herring in a bunch of ways. But some big "!" interest in the individuals and perspectives behind the scenes, due to the nature of the change.
(Also, seeing people redesigning the new logo to much applause is kind of a cringe. Again a big risk here is that they are unwittingly reconnecting a really unhealthy feedback loop, based on assumptions from an outsider's perspective/demand on the organization.)
Could it be that new leaders feel they have to demonstrate they're in change, and initiating a logo replacement is unfortunately much easier than doing something that is genuinely positive for stakeholders and shareholders?
While not outside of the realm of possibility, it's actually rare to see that kind of thought process play out in practice of working with businesses & NPOs on their logos.
Much more common is that there is a base of support for change from above, outside, and below.
Maybe related to the fact that "I changed our logo to suit myself" isn't broadly seen as a masterstroke in objective leadership practice.
I'm sorry, I have no idea what that statement actually means.
How do you quantify "a base support for change"? Would you ask staff if they'd prefer a pay rise ... or for that money to be spent on a new logo? Would you ask customers if they're prefer improved products ... or a new logo?
There is a reason I wrote "initiating a logo replacement". If a new-in-the-job boss pitches up in a meeting and announces "I think our logo is old. I think we need a new, fresh, relevant, inclusive logo", then who do you suppose is going to tell them they're wrong? The yes-crowd of middle managers just nod and agree. And there's your logo replacement process started.
No need for data, no need for any actual reasons to do something, just someone new in the neighbourhood marking their patch, like a dog at a lamppost.
[I worked at Pentagram for a while, though not on branding. I have seen plenty of vanity projects from big CEOs.]
So yeah, the coat-of-arms/bookplate format of the old logo is not where he’s headed.
Absent from the OP is consideration of the new logo on its own terms. I get an O for Oxford, the turning pages, and hint of a Möbius strip. It works for me.
On the other hand, the translation of the Latin on the old motto is “the Lord is my light,” paired with the crowns invoking royal fiat. Traditional, yes, but…
Another signal in the new logo may be a declaration of independence from the University of Oxford itself, because the old logo was just the University’s coat of arms.
https://www.google.com/search?q=rancilio+rocky+grinder+burrs...
Circles are _the_ graphical element/symbol of holistic energy with few others coming close.
Generally when I see a move to a circular logo in a new design brief it's a sign that the organization perceives that it must quickly heal from damage/protect itself from danger and put some aspects of the past behind. It is usually attempting to build capacity for a new direction as well. IMO this is usually not a fully conscious decision by the team.
"This is the world we live in"
No we can't agree on that. What you say is nonsense.
What about: if they want to signal modernness and inclusiveness (regardless whether they actually want to be modern and inclusive) they had to get rid of the logo?
First, tech communities are not exactly known for deep visual design-theory interest or background (for example, what's your personal experience level with logo design? This would inform both a tendency to radically re-summarize using the word "just", and a tendency to relate the description in nonsensical terms; it's a matter of education depth).
Also, I used to lecture college students on this stuff at length, so it's kind of plain ol' design thinking to me, from theory/psychology to application.
And then, a lot of people also call tech talk mumbo jumbo. For related reasons I don't really feel the need to justify or bring it down to earth any more than I'd try to do that with the Linux kernel in a random "kernel? sounds like mumbo jumbo" discussion.
But as always, in the right context the theory-practice connection provides leverage that can't be had elsewhere.
PS there are some absolutely great examples of this thinking if you are willing to empty the cup and explore the foundations. See the "In popular culture" section here as one possible point of departure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D
I can sort of see why they'd want to move away from the old logo, it hard to reproduce in various sizes, honestly not that unique either, it looks like any other very old logo and you'd have to know that it's Oxford University Press to recognize the logo.
The new one share the last problem: You need to know that it's the OUP ring logo and not one of the other 100 logos that looks just like it.
What I find to be an issue with many modern logos is that I don't see how they are expected to age. It seems more likely that they'll tossed aside completely in 10 to 20 years, for yet another redesign.
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.
So no big deal.
Although. There is Steve Jobs line. Where's he's trying to get engineers on the original Mac to eek out just a slight faster boot. We're going to sell 100 million of these things, can you make it boot 25 seconds faster? If you do that will save cumulatively 90 years worth of time. That's a human life. Can you save a human life!
I mean it's dumb and maybe funny but a minor annoyance over a long enough time and enough people could be worth complaining about.
It's modernist, minimalist crap, indistinguishable from all the other modernist, minimalist crap. Everyone might as well rebrand as solid-color circle distinguished by a numerically unique RGB value.
Their old logo was much better, since it harkens back to a literal coat of arms, which isn't something you see every day.
Undoubtedly influenced by Oxford and Cambridge but it's a design style adopted by so many universities it's practically generic for 'some sort of university thing logo'. I don't have strong feelings about the new logo either way but the idea the old one is some distinctive masterpiece seems misplaced.
It's like the GP comment complaining about 'modernist, minimalist crap, indistinguishable from all the other modernist, minimalist crap' never ran across one of the most recognizable university press marks out there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Press#/media/File:MIT_Pres...
I am a big fan of modernism even minimalism done well. MIT is an engineering school and its logo fits. I just object to lazy or default minimalism.
Which is, like, just your opinion, man.
Maybe here not there, but A quick google search suggests a university with a coat of arms logo is very common.
Except that a coat of arms has got to be THE most common logo for anything university related. I don't like the new one at all, but if you'd showed me the old one and asked me what it was for I'd have had no idea. Not memorable or recognizable at all, even if it is their coat of arms.
And the generic geometric object with some subtle styling has got to be THE most common logo for anything period.
The new logo is not one I could take seriously.
Airbrushed and homogenised in favour of a tire.
Thus, it must change because the purpose of a university is not to retain cultures and histories when no one else cares, it's not to improve the mental capabilities of the students.
It purpose instead is to pursue equity in 2 senses: no especially talented people of the wrong* parents are allowed to gain inordinate skills and the foundation makes gobs of money.
(*) Determination of wrongness changes over time, and the adage "2 wrongs don't make a right" is considered tomfoolery.
Do the marginalised peoples include the native Britons who were conquered by the Romans? Or is there a cut off point in your view of history? If the now native Britons, like me, want to retain links to the past, then should that be disallowed?
I like the Latin inscription, as it keeps a connection with the past. Good and bad, it is history I want to be connected to. I find the idea that it needs to be airbrushed bizarre, and the idea that Latin is solely a tool of "oppression" a complete misreading of history.
Spend some time researching the subject and it will make more sense.
This feels like a stretch. And almost breaks what little interest I have here. :(
Also, why do folks always impart way more significance to logo/label than makes sense? I can get the desire to want to change. That is natural. The idea that all changes matter is silly, though. Especially to the degree this one will be talked about. Probably less vitriol and energy is put into the literal buildings of the institute.
I'm not sure we can imply importance from the volume of communication; perhaps the opposite. After colors and names, logos/icons are probably the third easiest thing to bikeshed.
In fact, I would fully support any organization I'm in having a change most every year. I do appreciate the connection to the past and something old that many get from it. That said, it is easy to metaphorically make that connection by acknowledging what came before. The control and autonomy that you give to the next generations feels way more important.
In this case Oxford Press changed an iconic statement with a stupid generic say-nothing that could be a tire or a bagel company.
Think of it like a banner of an army. You don’t want stand behind a banner that says “I am with stupid”
It’s hard to convey to non design folk, but design does have an impact, even if it doesn’t bring world peace, it’s culturally significant.
What I don't get, is the odd idea that there is a universal iconography that every should agree with. For one, I don't find this rebranding that much worse than the old one. I actually assumed both icons on the first tweet were the new thing, as I easily think both are kind of bleh.
Finally, though, some nitpicks. Military banners are incredibly silly looking. Flags? The same. Usually with much simpler aesthetics that rely more on overall color than they do any iconography.
And saying it "could be a tire or a bagel company" is also idiotically offensive. What is wrong with tire and bagel companies? This betrays a sense of class belief that is hilarious when juxtaposed with many of the criticisms given. (Specifically, the old class having the better icon.)
Pretty sure a lot of people would answer “tyre company” or “gear manufacturer” or something. So it does not communicate well.
About the banner nitpick, banners needed to be seen from afar, during chaotic scenes, so were often quite easy to distinguish from afar :)
For bagels, I think you have a slightly better argument, but even then, https://99designs.com/inspiration/logos/bagel doesn't really look like what is on display here.
My nitpick on the banners was more that the iconography of them was not at all key in folks building an identity with them. I should have expanded and said it wasn't the banner that builds the identity. Rather, it is more likely the shared identity that builds the love of the banner.
I think the inverse is true: being in visual design means branding matters to you. Just as audio engineers wince at imperfections that no one else even hears.
And even that is probably more measurable than this; the people that came up with the new one are also "in design". Now you might say to that that it's different, because they were getting paid. But everyone in design is getting paid for design, so it's unsurprising they'd want to all talk about how important design is. But if you can only convince other designers, then that's a bit telling.
I mean, I like good product design as much as the next person. But it's extremely easy to overstate its importance.
Sometimes you have these crazy stages in the design process where the client choses the design by committee, and you get the blandest dullest compromise of them all. This looks a bit like that. This logo certainly feels like that.
There are a lot of schools in design, but it doesn’t mean there are no criteria. It really depends on who made this, how it was made and so on.
I feel design really fits into our and any culture. Think of iconic designs like coca cola, or nike, or apple. Also everything you own is probably designed at some point. Yeah maybe it’s not “world peace” significant, but culturally it is, it’s a social phenomenon.
(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 Nortel Networks—I do still love that globemark!—and the 2015 sans-serif Google logo which has become so ubiquitous as to make the previous serif version look weirdly quaint. But I liked neither of those at the time they were unveiled.)
Am I just a stick in the mud? Can you point out some rebrands that have been so wildly popular that I might begrudgingly admit that I actually liked them?
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 important to the success/failure of the game they are building.
The MIT Press had an amusing amount of thought that went into their logo. But... I would wager the vast majority of folks just don't see it.
Reminds me of that parody pepsi logo document. (At least, I think it was a parody?)
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: https://www.yourprojector.com/rebranding-u-turns/
The last one is particularly hilarious, because I attended the University of Waterloo in the late 1990s when they rebranded from a crest even older than the one shown as "original". In fact, that older crest looked just like the "final" crest. I'm glad they've finally brought it back; pity it took more than a decade to rectify the error.
> Reminds me of that parody pepsi logo document. (At least, I think it was a parody?)
No, I'm pretty sure that was actually real. At least if it was a parody, even CBS fell for it: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...
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?)
Some of the old LEGO logos aren't great (this may partially be from years of consistency, however).
But most of the "best rebrand" articles you find on google are just "logo in one font became similar logo in slightly different font".
I will give you this one, but…
> Some of the old LEGO logos aren't great…
True, but in the context of my original question, I don't think it's reasonable for me to have an opinion about rebrands that occurred before I became aware of the brand, and LEGO has been using the same logo since I got set 20 in 1977.
I _do_ vaguely recall the old Federal Express slanty logo, but I must admit I don't remember the rebrand _as such_, so I'm not sure how much I can count this one. But yes: a good example of a definite win as far as rebrands go.
Most previous versions were complicated messes. Windows 7 was I think the best version of the four color version.
I remember seeing the '95 start-up screen and its new UI for the first time - I was quite amazed by how much better it looked (I was at an impressionable age back then).
The Windows XP logo was a massive improvement.
https://imgur.com/DvKPvYz
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT)#Corporate_m...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I do wonder if I'd have liked it if I'd previously been familiar with the original woodcut logo, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#/media/F...
https://blog.logomyway.com/ups-logo-history/
(interesting to me: the 1937 logo used a san-serif font)
Yes. But it's normal. People who weren't involved in the project, or don't know design, very commonly have strong negative reactions to a company they know rebranding. I don't know why.
Come next year you'll have either completely forgotten about this, or have no opinion at all.
I doubt it. There are still so many rebrands / logo changes that I get angry thinking about. Off the top of my head (in addition to the ones mentioned in my replies to other comments in this thread):
- Meta. It just confirmed what I already knew but had been desperately denying: Facebook is dead.
- The new, nearly indistinguishable multi-coloured Google Apps icons. (Were _no_ UX researchers involved in this decision?)
- Apple imposing the squirkle on macOS icons. (My laptop is not a tablet!)
- Google imposing the white circle on Android app icons. (Phone icons were already small enough before they were shrunk so as to fit into the stupid circles!)
- The new Slack logo.
- Instagram ditching their original camera logo/icon for that god-awful squirkly gradient monstrosity. (The day I saw that was the day I knew I would _never_ install their app on my phone.)
- American Airlines dropping their previous Vignelli-designed logo (and Helvetica).
- The London 2012 Olympics logo (the pink monstrosity described as "Lisa Simpson giving Bart a blow job") that replacing the London 2012 bid logo (with ribbons in the Olympics colours forming the shape of the river Thames).
That goes back at least 15 years. I have a long memory and hold grudges, at least when it comes to awful rebrandings.
Burger King: https://jkrglobal.com/case-studies/burger-king/ Simple, but fun. Retro, instead of over modern. Better than the logo is all the supporting fonts and imagery. Super aesthetic.
InstaCart: https://www.wolffolins.com/case-study/instacart Pretty recent, tech company, not a beloved brand at the time of rebrand, but wow it's a great rebrand. Way more character, way more fun.
Leibniz: https://auge-design.com/work/leibniz-design-relaunch/ Subtle changes, embraces the character, modernizes the packaging, makes a consistent design system. Maybe not what you're looking for, but still a cool example of new design done well and embraced.
New York State Parks: https://id29.com/our-work/new-york-state-parks Clean and happy.
CNET: https://www.wearecollins.com/work/cnet/ Big name, awesome rebrand. Tons of character, no one misses the old logo or vibe.
Midi: https://www.pentagram.com/work/midi/story Really interesting supporting logos and graphics. Maybe a little too heavily minimalist, but man that's a cool idea to have a dynamic icon for your logo!
Mojang: https://www.boldscandinavia.com/work/mojang-studios/ Tons of fun, reflective of blocks and pixels.
DK: https://www.pentagram.com/work/dk Good example of modernization without losing character.
These are some bigger names, but honestly the really interesting stuff is inside smaller companies who don't have to worry so much about legacy. There's some beautiful, character filled work out there.
I like this one. Not spotted the new logo in the UK yet, but it would definitely make me less determined to avoid the company's restaurants.
> InstaCart
I'm not really familiar with this company so I don't really have any feelings about the rebrand per se. I do like the new logo, which is clever—but after looking up what it used to look like I can say I prefer the aesthetics of the original.
> Leibniz
Again a brand I'm not familiar with. Fair point about the consistent design system, but again I prefer the original logo.
> New York State Parks.
Again not one I'm familiar with, but here I can say I LOVE the new logo: who can not love it when an organisation makes it so obvious they wish they were Canadian?
> CNET
This one I definitely was familiar with. Hadn't seen the new branding. My reaction is "looks weird; those letters make me feel uncomfortable".
> Midi
WTF. The new logo is cool in and of itself, but this rebranding makes me actively angry:
- The MIDI logo has been used as a symbol to identify connectors for decades. Changing it will cause unnecessary confusion.
- The important feature of MIDI is that it is _digital_, but the new logo is all about _analog_ waveforms.
- It's also stupidly confusing. Literally the first thought that passed through my mind when I saw the new logo is "did the MIDI organisation get bought by Meta??"
> Mojang
I'll give you this one. The new logo is pretty bad, but the original was _awful_.
> DK
I am literally* crying. (* not literally).
> These are some bigger names, but honestly the really interesting stuff is inside smaller companies who don't have to worry so much about legacy.
I think this raises an important point. Smaller companies without much history do not destroy much when they throw their old branding away. Bigger, older companies do.
I am on the younger side/moved to New York recently. Without knowing the history of the Met logo I have always found the (new) logo fairly iconic- the stickers visitors wear, and the various paraphernalia with the logo look good to me. I find it clean and sharp. I think I actually prefer it to the old logo (which I do not remember seeing before today)
"The Mets met at the Met".
And what did they meet? Was it also the Met?
I doubt an American museum could ever change that, embracing something so generic is limiting for identity & brand awareness IMO.
I don't think one very small country should be the primary blocker to their branding decisions.
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
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.
Would this conversation ever happen?
I'm going on holiday to New York City. I'm going to the Met to check out their impressionist paintings.
Oh, they turned Scotland Yard into an art gallery now?
I'm applying for a job at/in (the only tiny difference) the met
Nevermind all the sentences you could come up with where the context is revealed only later, so yes you immediately realise you had it wrong, but you had it wrong.
It's not really about 'people will be confused' anyway, I just mean it's bad brand awareness, it weakens the identity.
The only example I can think of with a strong brand for a generic name is Apple.
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.
Human language ambiguity and locals have their shibboleths - we don't have to optimize for tourists.
One might think it'd be similarly aiming to capture the hearts and minds of tourists, but TfL's been so aggressively pro-Oyster, then/now contactless, that afaict it's always been just about as hard as possible for tourists while still being convenient for Londoners. It makes some sort of sense, it's subsidised by the London taxpayer after all - so it is 'by Londoners for Londoners' - but I think surely it would be possible simultaneously to make it easier for and capture more money from tourists. I digress - point was I think to be that TfL doesn't really care about brand, especially not globally. Maybe I'm wrong to assume that 'the met' does.
It's pretty confusing.
I try not to care about corporate logos too much, but I have to say I was little betrayed when my football team changed their typeface from a unique font to a more generic one, because I feel that represents me and my city (even moreso than my city's local museum, whose new logo I don't prefer, but I don't let it get to me).
People devalue the past is another.
The old logo was honestly a bit messy, too, though.
Lower serifs on the Ts though, those I dislike very much.
[1] https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506
Whereas with the previous logo that’s not possible.
I'm a bit mixed about them moving to a sans-serif font, even as someone who usually prefers them, as I find for printed word serif can look rather wonderful but it's hardly the baddest of sins.
This means that you are taking a recognizable easy to spot image that says: 'this book is vetted and serious, trust it like you trust us', and replacing it with a logo that is less recognizable (and by my prediction won't be around in 100 years). For anyone who browses shelves this will, in fact, reduce utility.
It's a small thing, but it is worth considering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Western_Reserve_Universit...
Is it as bad as the Met's new logo? Probably not. Is it pretty objectionable, and universally maligned? Yeah, definitely.
Anybody else got one to share for our shared schadenfreude?
Wow, this took me a second but now it’s the only thing I can see.
The 2020 MLB spring training hat logos were universally hated, but the Padres had a notably bad one: https://www.crossingbroad.com/2020/02/padres-changing-spring...
https://www.seriouspieseattle.com/
scroll down until you see the man with his penis on fire. It's on all their signs.
Why does he also have no arms?
Yeah, this new OUP logo looks great for a surf school too. Definitely a wave in the circle.
https://euclidnetwork.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/roskilde...
I used to call it "brain sponge" when I was a PhD student there. (I liked that university a lot, don't get me wrong, just talking about the logo).
I think it is supposed to represent two arms grasping each other, but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind when I saw it.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/kXl5S36
The consultants must have been high-fiving each other after that one landed, it's like trading in your car only to find that the saleswoman has sold you your own car back, at a profit.
(SGI later collapsed due to "Corporate Campus Syndrome", and other companies, including Google, now occupy the wacky buildings they spent even more money on. It's kind of like a higher order of hermit crab).
It's sad what happened to them, as in their prime they really were a category of their own.
I remember sneaking over to their cafeteria, from the Landings office park across the street (where I did stints at some startups). They didn't bother to check badges. I met up with a bunch of old cow-orkers from Apple and just kind of hemmed and hawed when they asked what group I was in. :-)
But the lessons are clear: Watch your competitors carefully, and don't build a stupid corporate campus because the gods simply hate that kind of hubris.
They built single big machines and gave away the best swag. The leather jacket, in particular, was coveted.
* University of Portsmouth
* The University of Portsmouth
* Portsmouth University
[1] Yes, that's not -exactly- an acronym
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
It's not an initialism, like IBM, but it is an acronym, like Benelux.
Why would a superficial similarly to "MIT" be any be useful?
Any potential student should be able to look past that.
Guess it was for English only
That said, SGI had an iconic logo of a cube formed from a single periodic pipe before. I was using SGIs daily at the time and I almost cried when they did the rebrand.
The rebrand replaced it with a contemporary (at the time, mind you) typography logo that would look outdated if the compamy still existed.
To their credit, the rebrand did include a typeface design for use with all their design, i.e. detached from the logo.
The resp. fonts would have the aforementioned issues though -- one variant was used for the logo which is kinda cheap.
But at least they had a tyepface designed and it was recognizable. That rarely happens. Commonly a rebrand will just swap the old typeface for something different but already existing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#/media/File%3...
Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky. It also would have been expensive to reproduce well on letterhead, and I wouldn’t dare think of how that looked on photocopies (often monochrome at the time)
Now, could they have stylized/simplified the old logo and keep it nice? I wouldn’t know.
Now this is just silly. By 1999 most web users had at least True Color displays at SVGA if not XGA. While VGA resolutions with 256 colors were a design consideration those users were not the norm.
With that said, the old SGI looked just fine even at 256 colors. The shape was distinctive and it was all grayscale so 256 color palettes had all the colors needed for the logo with little noticeable dithering. There were even good 1-bit versions that were very distinctive.
The old SGI logo was cast in plastic as a 2.5D version on the workstations, color printed in color brochures and otherwise there was a much simplified black and white version.
Not to demean anyone like it's cool that this matters to people I just cannot even remotely understand it.
Why pay £100k for something that doesn’t matter?
Fun story, I worked at (unnamed fortune 500 company) a while back, and they paid a consulting company something like 10 million to evaluate and suggest changes to the company's job titles. Not the actual jobs. Just the titles.
So I went from : associate (generic engineer role) to (generic engineer role) I.
Brilliant.
Extremely generic logos don't offer distinction, and it's a bad idea for a strong brand to not clearly signal that brand in their products and marketing, especially in fields where there are many competitors (ie elite higher education).
And they always fail to understand what actually happens in design, what it's actually for.
I haven't considered context or reputation or brand continuity - but the article seems to be claiming it's intrinsically bad and that feels like hyperbole.