A new logo is catnip for commentators. With every brandmark update comes a barrage of memes and graphic buffoonery from amateur design critics racing to outpun each other:
Graphic designer Michael Bierut, who's often on the receiving end of these hot takes, characterizes the phenomenon as "drive-by shootings punctuated by the occasional lynch mob conducted by anonymous people with the depth of barroom philosophers and the attention span of fruit flies."
Bierut is the designer behind the workplace collaboration app Slack's recent logo redesign, which turned a colorful hashtag into a quadrant of teardrops and lozenges. He calls it an evolution of the octothorpe, but the vocal masses can't un-see a "penis swastika" or a quartet of ducks.
Why can't we resist messing with logos, or those whose job it is to mess with logos? Let's hash it out.
 Logo bashingFebruary 01, 2019 |
Cut 'em some slack
A new logo is catnip for commentators. With every brandmark update comes a barrage of memes and graphic buffoonery from amateur design critics racing to outpun each other:
Graphic designer Michael Bierut, who's often on the receiving end of these hot takes, characterizes the phenomenon as "drive-by shootings punctuated by the occasional lynch mob conducted by anonymous people with the depth of barroom philosophers and the attention span of fruit flies."
Bierut is the designer behind the workplace collaboration app Slack's recent logo redesign, which turned a colorful hashtag into a quadrant of teardrops and lozenges. He calls it an evolution of the octothorpe, but the vocal masses can't un-see a "penis swastika" or a quartet of ducks.
Why can't we resist messing with logos, or those whose job it is to mess with logos? Let's hash it out.
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95%: Share of Slack users who would hate the new logo, as reportedly anticipated by Slack
$100 million: Amount Gap is estimated to have spent on its historic 2010 epic-fail logo refresh
29: Number of days Yahoo! CEO Marissa Meyer posted a bogus Yahoo! logo before unveiling the search engine's actual official brandmark
2,000+: Number of times Google has doodled on its own logo
250,000: Comments posted on the logo forum Brand New over the last 10 years
34%: Share of printer's ink McDonald's would save if it redesigned its golden arches logo, according to Ecobrand's estimate
54,253: Signatures supporting a petition to bar the University of California from changing its seal
$25: Fee Penised.com charges to vandalize your competitor's logo with genitalia
What would Freud say?
Is that a penis in the middle of the Washington Wizards logo? Are the letters humping in the Trump-Pence campaign monogram? In many ways, logo design is an exercise of layering meaning onto random shapes and letters. But why do our minds go to sex when we see an abstract shape?
Freudian scholar Elizabeth Rottenberg, who wrote the book For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida, offers a diagnosis: "Sigmund Freud would hardly be surprised by the tendency to see sex and genitalia everywhere. Clearly there is something wish-fulfilling about such perceptions. His theory tells us that mental events are automatically regulated by the pleasure principle," she explains to Quartz. "It may be that logos, in their very indetermination, are a kind of modern-day Rorschach test—a free-for-all in which our individual and collective fantasies take center stage."
Sometimes a meaty logo controversy can even be good for a designer's career. The small Moscow-based studio Shuka gained global attention for its superb work (pictured) on the so-called "pawnographic" World Chess Championship.
Notable logo freakouts
1960: Chase Manhattan chairman John McCloy has a meltdown upon seeing the new bank logo designed by Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar. Six months later he was spotted proudly wearing a tie with the logo all over it.
1991: P&G phases out its 100-year-old "man and the moon" logo after it was labeled a Satanic symbol, with 666 hidden in the crescent's beard
2000: The Penobscot Indian Nation appeals the Cleveland Indians to retire the Chief Wahoo, which they describe as "an offensive, degrading, and racist stereotype."
2001: Adbusters unfurls the Corporate American flag, a "symbolic disobedience" against the all-encompassing influence of private corporations in public affairs
2007: Neurophysiologist Graham Harding gives logo haters ammunition when he suggests that a TV spot for the widely-maligned 2012 London Olympics logo could cause an epileptic seizure. Organizers nix the commercial, but keep the logo.
2014: Airbnb endures its vagina-and-scrotum logo moment
2015: Hillary Clinton's perfectly imperfect presidential campaign logo divides critics
2016: Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick plays art director and confuses riders with "atoms and bits" badges; The internet mourns the loss of Instagram's retro camera avatar
2018: Melania Trump scribbles "BE BEST" and calls it a logo; The Library of Congress's painfully generic logo causes a stir
"Failure is built into creativity…the creative act involves this element of 'newness' and 'experimentalism,' then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure."
—Saul Bass, legendary designer of iconic title sequences and corporate logos
Pop quiz What's the world's oldest unaltered corporate logo? |
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Why are brands getting bland?
The latest trend in luxury fashion: soulless sans serifs. A plethora of high-end brands have adopted generic all-caps typographic logos in recent years. Font expert Sarah Hyndman tells Bloomberg that part of the reason is because modern consumers find script treatments pretentious. The move fits into the larger context of "blanding"—the rise of Instagram-friendly brands centered on what Fast Company calls "minimal products with a minimal logos that somehow still speak clearly about their superiority."
Marc Bain writes for Quartz (subscription) that one of the main drivers for the switch is that they render better on digital screens and mobile devices. Luxury sales are increasingly taking place online, where brands rely on recognition over distinction. Of course, fashion is famously fickle. There is already a serif-happy backlash brewing in branding.
How to prepare for the backlash
Logo bashing is so prevalent that many companies prepare carefully-crafted communication strategies with every branding announcement. "Crowdsorceress" Alex Daly, PR advisor for design start-ups, offers advice on how to deflect logo bullies: "Engage the positivity and constructive criticism; ignore the trolls. In the end, people will get used to the change pretty quickly. (Well, if it's good, of course! Hire good designers y'all.)" In other words, stand your ground.
A compelling rationale can help sell any logo. Design legend Paul Rand was known for preparing detailed books whenever he introduces a new logo design. Watch the master unveil the NeXT logo to Steve Jobs with a 100-page book.
Know your disses
If you're going to nitpick, at least learn the lingo:
- Kerning: The spacing between letters. As in: "The new ZARA logo is giving me anxiety. Please add some kerning" —@LindaDesigner
- Logo ≠ brand: A logo is a graphic symbol or wordmark unique to a company. A brand is about the feelings associated with that company. For a demonstration, watch the video Saul Bass created to explain the concept to AT&T executives
- Penis vs. phallus: Jacques Lacan clarifies that "penis" refers to the biological organ while "phallus" is the symbolism associated with it in sexual fantasy. As in "Little known fact: everytime my mom sees the Amazon logo she says, 'penis.' Guaranteed, every time." —@Taylor_Dearden
That looks like…
Plagiarism! Copycat! Nothing delights the internet more than pointing out how one logo resembles another. Many suggest that Airbnb's mark is a copy-paste replica of a logo designed by Japanese graphic designer Ueda Akisato in 1975 for the Azuma Drive-in. Bentley's winged logo is too similar to MINI's; MetLife is a mirror of Diffen; and CNN's monogram is a close cousin of the US Food and Drug Administration's mark.
Among the most controversial lookalike logo cases involves the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In 2015, Belgian graphic designer Olivier Debie sued the Olympics committee for using a four-color mark designed by Tokyo-based designer Kenjiro Sano that he claims was stolen from his work. In one widely-circulated gif, Debie demonstrated how the Tokyo Olympic's brandmark resembles the logo for Théâtre de Liege that he designed two years earlier. Shamed, Japanese organizers pulled it and held a national logo design contest.
A universal formula
Graphic designer Marian Bantjes has a provocative proposal that could silence all logo shenanigans. "What if we had a graphic vocabulary that actually meant something?" she writes. Inspired by the logic of heraldic crests, she devised a formula using standardized symbols to denote the industry; various lines to indicate an organization's corporate structure; and drop shadows to signal its revenue.
"Designing logos would be an act of science: careful symbology applied in, yes, a creative and pleasing manner, that tells the tale of mergers, takeovers and change of business," she explains. "At least then it would all mean something."
How would the Baltimore Orioles' logo fare if it were reimagined as other bird species? One graphic designer decided to find out.
Poll Which retired logo do you miss most? |
In yesterday's poll about pagers, 71% of you, asked about them making a comeback as a fashion statement, said "oh dear, please no." 📧 Anita writes: "Around the time I stopped working at the hospital and being on-call, I adopted a little Maltese terrier mix. He's a great little guy, but has one weird characteristic: One of his many 'snore settings' sounds just like my old Motorola pager, set to vibrate, rattling in a dish on the bedside table. I've lost count of the times I've rolled out of bed from a dead sleep, groping around for the pager in the dark."
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Today's email was written by Anne Quito, edited by Jessanne Collins, and produced by Luiz Romero.
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