What on Earth is going on with simplified logos?

this is an official article by discord showing in great detail why they recently changed their brand look the post goes through the various justifications for the changes to the logo word mark and brand color for the logo they noted concerns about the readability of the antennas it has when printed on different types of materials or when printed on really small surfaces such as a pin the document even noted how parts of the original logo were asymmetrical the word mark was changed overall to be more legible the new brighter color they call blurple was chosen to be more bold and playful on top of this they refined and diversified their whole brand color palette they even got thorough feedback from members of the discord community for direction on style colors and even some of the in-app phrasing so it looks like they have everything in order no change seems arbitrary and each one has logical reasoning behind it so what did people think of it [Music] oh now before we move on with the rest of the video i believe some changes are in order ah that's better i don't think i've seen a comment section in such unanimous agreement about hating something since youtube rewind 2018. it's kind of odd isn't it just how much backlash there is for changes that compared to other things we've seen this year are pretty minor the discord logo just looks more like a game controller and the shade of blue has been saturated by like five percent however even though from a practical design standpoint many of these changes make sense i can still understand the hate this discord logo does seem more reduced less playful this word mark is less dynamic more awkwardly soft looking if that makes any sense and the brighter color well i stare at screens for long periods of time so i really don't need any more brightness than i already get it seems to me that while discord tried to improve readability while they made it more convenient by simplifying it they missed much of the emotional and aesthetic content associated with their brand this simplifying trend is something that many people have started to catch onto it seems that for whatever reason brands are choosing to simplify their look to what feels like an excessive degree and almost none of these changes have been welcomed positively by the internet how is that possible how can companies with their vast resources make such consistently hated changes are these businesses just incompetent probably not most of them i can guarantee that for every stupid little change some designer or design group has created an even more detailed even more obsessive document justifying their logo changes these justifications are usually pretty easy to grasp they usually include things like readability on different size screens simplifying things to be more memorable and creating a more refined visual language all these things add up to make logos that are just so convenient so clean so confident for whatever brand change there is going to be some sort of logic behind it but there's also always going to be a trade-off a square is convenient a square is easy to read on different size screens a square is easy to memorize but logos are often more than a square what about character what about personality what about actually communicating what the brand is supposed to be simplification like anything is a designer's tool that can be used well or poorly the starbucks logo has been simplified several times but it's far more than just a few polygons and everyone can still recognize it the apple logo the shell logo the nike logo these are logos that work on their own without any further detail but then there's logos that have been simplified and flattened to what feels like their own detriment take firefox now there's been some misinformation surrounding this as for a while this image was shared around which made the swoosh look like the current logo which was not the case this is the parent brand logo which represents the family of firefox products this is the current logo i even have it right here this might be one of the least drastic changes out of all we've seen this past year but i still feel it's a downgrade the logo they used right before this one was basically in my opinion at the perfect balance between simplified and detailed but they took it one step further and now the earth doesn't even look like an earth unless our oceans turn violet without me knowing i haven't really been going outside and touching grass like all the cool kids say the little paw of the original is gone removing just that extra touch of visual communication now it looks a little more like the earth itself is on fire apparently the logo change was to fit in with a larger family of products mozilla designers said that as an icon that fast fox with a flaming tail doesn't offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family petco removed its iconic cat and dog making it infinitely less friendly though they might be coming back in some form dunkin donuts has removed the donuts from its name because according to the ceo they want to further modernize the dunkin donuts experience from our next generation restaurants to our menu innovation on-the-go ordering and value offerings all delivered at the speed of dunkin i don't know about you guys but i don't feel like that's going to catch on for a while i couldn't understand why i disliked the pringle change it looked relatively the same even the text is identical but then it hit me the pringles logo isn't just a logo it's also a face a face with a glisten in its eyes and brown hair and a mustache when you take those things away it looks more well dead it's not much more than a smiley face at this point we spent the last two years in research and design to create a modern look for the cans and mr p style that reflects the bold flavor in every pringle's crisp and stack says the senior director of marketing for pringles the patreon logo is easily the worst going from a logo that is fine and recognizable to i'm going to be blunt here two shapes that's what it is two shapes that are supposed to represent ap yeah you know where i got that p feeling more from this one if not removing iconic and meaningful detail from logos means that on a 144p smartphone screen your logo can't be read by a grandma without her glasses on i think that's a sacrifice that's worth it you know if we calm down and stand back yeah the changes are still mostly dumb but then another thought occurs to me is this where we're at our emotions can be swayed by a bunch of shapes and colors slightly moving around i'm sure there are many out there who just find the changes amusing a funny conversation starter but for many there's a tinge of genuine anger and confusion buried beneath those lighter emotions but why design is important yes even small things can matter everyone knows the frustration of poor design everyone knows the disorientation when one pulls on a pull handle and the door can only be pushed logo redesigns like patreon and pringles i would argue are just downgrades i think they're just taking things away instead of refining them now one's less recognizable and one's less lifelike discord's new color will strain your eyes just a little bit more even if you can't pick out design features that work against it in a practical sense people will still tend to react negatively to change no matter what it is it's just hard to please people design is a difficult thing with lots of subjective elements here's just one example let's take master chart for example they have removed the big block of tests and the intersecting lines and just left a red and yellow circle i actually find this to be a really good choice because it does what it needs to do when you're shopping using your card in your daily life all you need to see are the two circles to recognize that it's the mastercard any other text or details would just be distracting with the mastercard logo it wasn't flashier out there but for the minimalism change they left it to just the two balls and made a venn diagram for gosh sakes not everything needs to be that basic literally anyone could make this logo but brands aren't just about designs they're also about emotions i could easily make the argument that our lives our happiness our entertainment our means of communication our means of income are more tied to a few brands than they have ever been even children as young as two can express brand awareness far before they even know how to read in one study children were mostly aware of brands that were usually targeted at children like disney and mcdonald's but sometimes brands not targeted at children were recognized as well such as toyota by age three to four children can make judgments about a brand and connections about what a brand can say about their personalities whether one is strong cool smart or popular even very young children today demonstrate brand knowledge and influence similar to that displayed by older children just a few decades ago if you like to brand as a kid chances are it will be much harder as an adult to lose that loyalty it seems brands more than ever play a part in some of our earliest development to my surprise people were apparently upset about the nickelodeon change a few years back i suppose since i didn't watch nickelodeon as early as a lot of other people the nickelodeon logo type just seemed like it always existed like that there could certainly be an element of nostalgia making people more vulnerable to change than is reasonable but it's not like this is new the american identity is made of brands it's been made of brands for a long time in many ways we are a brand culture a logo change is the most obvious change to that brand if you've spent any time on the internet you can probably think of some change in a website you use that seemed backwards and stupid for me i know a lot about youtube's history hey we're youtube we're going to remove a bunch of useful features because of some vague creator feedback even though when we announce these changes on twitter for some reason we receive massive backlash from countless real creators in the community we removed community contributions annotations probably soon the dislike button and instead we've added much more useful features like an editor which i'll admit has some useful features but the one it's really missing is text which oh yeah and we've added a system that ranks your videos so when a video does poorly you can feel even worse about it i can't believe i've allowed my happiness to be determined by a top 10 list oversimplifying logos is just a short and sweet way to show how powerless we all are to these companies and whatever inane decisions they choose to make or at least that's what it feels like there are usually logical reasons behind these changes that maybe we don't recognize at first but that doesn't reduce the sting when it seems like someone insists on fixing things that weren't broken in the first place you

Channel: Solar Sands

Views: 2,665,882

Keywords: Solar Sands, Simplified Logos, Oversimplified, Logos, Art, Drawing

Id: gA6L7pgcUbM

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Pixelen]

Minimalism is in! I like the new Discord logo but not keen on the Pringles one.

[u/rob__mac]

Couldn’t this video be boiled down to “I have noticed a trend in brand design”?

[u/giveusyourlighter]

I kinda like the new patreon logo more than the old one tbh.