Funny, I'm the opposite. The old logos look fuddy-duddy, like stuff that my grandmother would have loved.
The new logos make me think -- oh, maybe they're actually doing something cool and relevant today, and not stuck in outdated ideas of luxury that include full sets of china and silver and mink coats.
I had the same reaction as you, but the point makes a lot of sense to me after some consideration. If I cover up the new ones, I can TOTALLY see how someone could associate the old ones with values and styles they find outdated. At an extreme, if I imagine asking my 16yo niece about the old logos, I wouldn't be at all surprised by a highly negative association with the old.
Yes exactly. They look like they're for grandma and will go with her pearls. And a Rolls-Royce.
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.
I've noticed this loss of creativity and personality before. It's very noticeably in building architecture. Now it's taken over web architecture. All websites and logos starting to look the same-ish.
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.
Just wait til the next generation come in, who've grown up designing widgetes for 3D printing. Weird procedural geometry, swoopy curves and crazy patterns galore! :D
Back in the 80's, my dad invested tons of money into a top of the line computer (a 386), plotter, software, and training, when CAD was first a thing.
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.
Building architecture is subject to physics, building code laws, and big differences in cost (measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more).
I do not see why the same dynamics would apply to a logo/font, which surely have very little cost difference between any two.
The design cycle is especially obvious in the case of Airbnb et al.: they all went from having cursive logo fonts to sans-serif.
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.
I wonder if it's to do with fixed-width serif fonts looking "old" due to their association with old text printers? Now sans-serif looks 'new' by comparison. Couple that with the 'clean sleek minimalist' look that all the modern tech companies have popularized and everything's re-converged on another round of samey looks. We're ripe for another new wave any year now. What'll it be this time? Comic sans? sARcAsTiC?
That might be some of it, but I think there are even more quotidian answers: large companies often have fixed design budgets (by virtue of having a design staff sitting around, waiting for things to do) and are generally under pressure from investors, etc. to demonstrate market fit and relevance.
In other words: "what are you paying all these designers for, if you aren't going to have them match the latest trends?"
There's been much virtual ink and video play time discussing the phenomenon. Just do a search "why are designs so boring?"
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
That's way too hopeful. AI is not creative, it's a tool that gives you what it calculates to be the best solution which is taken from the space of all pre-existing solutions. So if anything it will double down on the lack of creativity and keep showing whatever worked before referring us down a cycle of dull, but very machine-predictable mediocrity.
AI is not the solution for making things more creative.
It’s also way too hopeful to think that most people being made redundant by AI will suddenly discover something else they’re talented at (and not disrupted by AI nor the sudden influx of competition) and live merrily ever after.
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.
Some of the AI art I've been browsing is far better than many human artists could create, it totally lacks the blandness and dumb trend-following of human creators.
AI will need to get much better, unfortunately, for that to happen. And AI will trigger even more minimalism in the short run.
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.
commercial design needs to hit a set of 2 contradictory goals:
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.
> Also, designers, like most people, are inherently uncreative
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.
In a way, it reminds me of flag designs. You can be creative with minimal color choice and patterns (Arizona), or you can be a riot of pattern and color (Maryland). Just don't be the same as everyone else (seal on blue field).
Reason I bring this up is the Southwest flag livery - which the MD one in particular really stands out.
Icons inside programs too. Just this morning I got confused trying to un-mute myself inside Discord. Like at some point these braindead designers need to realize that an important part of "UX" is that users should easily be able to find what they're looking for and differentiate it from the next ugly white-on-grey icon that looks the same.
I just don't get why companies change their branding every 5 minutes.
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.
I was employee No.3 in a start-up a long time ago.
When the founders & senior management started
spending time redesigning the (perfectly fine) logo,
I knew it was the beginning of the end.
I began to look for an escape route to another role.
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
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.
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.
Sure, a restricted subset of serifs and typically when you’re reading a run of text i.e body copy. But the typical neoclassical serifs used in high fashion (think the Vogue logo) with their hairline serifs will look awful scaled to the sizes needed on mobile – regardless of screen definition.
Serif fonts read fine on any screen with at least a pixel density of Apple's Retina displays. Subjective preferences are another matter, of course. I prefer serifs even on worse displays, because my brain decodes them better. And I will basically refuse to read sans serif in print, or rather, my brain refuses to comply anyway.
Thank you for putting into words something that's I've been wondering about.
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?
But your corp very likely wants to look young and fresh and not like a very serious, but ultimately boring lawyer agency.
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.
It’s the same reason all UX Design went super flat. Flat geometric shapes and text are easier to display at various widths and size’s across a lot of different types of devices. Doing anything more complicated than colored in wireframes is too expensive to produce especially when time to market is important.
As a UX designer I hate this but that’s the reality of why every site has the same boring flat design.
Text is also going out of fashion because supporting multiple languages is expensive compared to just a single set of hieroglyphs for everyone everywhere in the world.
Funnily enough, many phone displays have much higher pixel densities than notebook, desktop, and TV displays, and thus would have little problems rendering the serifs, ligatures, and other fancy bits of digital serif typefaces compared to the old 72/96 DPI displays from the late '90s and early 2000s.
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.
The pixel density might have increased, but phone screens fit less information than desktop screens, so the logo can't take up as much space. The goal isn't good reproduction, but rather improving legibility and recognisability at small physical sizes.
I have written two blog posts that sort touch on this subject. The increase in screen pixel density has had a much larger impact on web design as a discipline than is commonly acknowledged.
I’m aware. But when you’re trying to set a tiny brand mark over a photo in the corner of some social media thumbnail, a screen’s fidelity is not the limiting factor, it’s the human eye.
True about the definition, but portrait consumption remains a problem, the horizontal space on the header is much smaller, and many old school logos that worked on stores and websites would end up on two lines on mobiles.
It started before then. My school switched from a rather elegant 19th century (I think) design to something more streamlined that I never really liked around 2000. But I don't really disagree in general. I know when my company did a rebrand, one of the drivers was that the old logo had a lot of fine detail. (It also had some aspects that you couldn't unsee once someone mentioned them and it basically got the company's name wrong--which still gets people confused to this day.)
Playing devil’s advocate here: the message itself could be written in an easily legible font (plus an image, potentially), and the company logo could still be cursive or whatever, making it much more distinct. Once the logo shape is learned, it should be easy to recognize.
I love that I can't tell if the Adobe sponsored content a couple of paragraphs in is an exhibit, or just coincidence, because it's a perfect example of the phenomenon.
I think the generic answer is trend and fashion, mixed with fear of failure. If you do it like/similar to everyone else, you won't get the blame.
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.
Forget the fonts. What's going on with Diane von Furstenburg rebranding to DIANE (invisible word) VON (linebreak) FURSTENBURG?
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?
I'll tell you exactly why: because graphic design, which used to be about concept and humanity and risk-taking, has been transformed into a darkpattern-loving exploitative commodity in which no truly creative person wants to live.
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.
Design is a bit of a fashion industry. Lots of people imitating each other. I'm not a designer but I know a few good ones and appreciate good design.
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.
True. But this effect isn't limited to design. How many cookie cutter / copy-cat businesses (i.e., apps) do we see? The origin of lack of (brand) identity is rooted in the companies themselves and their leadership.
The irony? Avoiding risk is itself a risk. The higher your chance of failure, the more significant this risk (from self-commodit-izing).
Also maybe a symptom of chasing a quick profit in the short term over other considerations, such as product quality. So better play it safe so the valuation rises by the time the manager/designer/marketer has moved on to another company?
IMHO the imitation serves a function. Familiarity conveys a message associated with that familiarity, that is the nature of the brand(cheap or high quality, for young or for old etc) and the brands need to update their logos to convey the correct message as their customers churn(people grow up and then get old).
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.
The expensive brands sell accessories and shoes for that reason. You have to have a model figure to wear a Chanel dress or a Hugo Boss suit, but everyone can do a handbag or shoes.
The way you put this makes it sound like the process of design you described does not create the ecology you described, but it does. Why do you think "the youth" have different tastes? Fashion is constantly being dreamed up by influential brands, and they attempt to impose their vision of the future in such a way that it will become the new norm. This process doesn't just happen by itself. At the same time, outsider styles emerge and become popular by virtue of doing something different and catchy, it is a constant pursuit of holding the banner and commanding attention by many parties. Those who simply chase the style of the day will always be out of the loop because by the time they deliver it's already the past.
Of course the process is not the course of nature but no single brand has the power to design it. Instead, politics happen innovations happen new brands and new lifestyles come and go and each and everything is designed bit by bit but there's a no grand design. There's of course a literature and know how that piles up and the new designs takes cue of those but still, there's no grand design. It just evolves over time as people respond to everything that happens with the world. It doesn't happen by itself as a biological process but it does happen by itself as a sociological process. The biology just defines the pace of it.
Oh dear. My eyes literally hurt while looking at it. Its like the text moves away from me, straight into the screen. It's not an animation right? I got astigmatism. Funny how the excuse is "More Accessible" ... but I guess the picture is the problem, not the font or the devil eyes on the logo.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadThe 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.
https://imgur.com/NyhbDFC
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.
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.
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...
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?"
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.
https://www.creativebloq.com/news/logos-look-the-same
It's definitely a trend.
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.
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)
https://youtu.be/oEj-2qmtvrU?si=KvfZ5KzwvHgjPoYP
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.
Wasn’t it the 1920s when sans serif typefaces became a major fad?
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-m...