There's no accounting for taste. This isn't the sort of thing you can really quantify, and if you do you'll lock yourself into a way of viewing things that prev

There's no accounting for taste. This isn't the sort of thing you can really quantify, and if you do you'll lock yourself into a way of viewing things that prevents you from being a good designer. Design is mostly trying 100 things and picking the good one because you have taste, which is a thing you get through years of study, practice, and reminding yourself that you're a worthless hack at 4am in the morning. Anyway as someone who's spent the requisite sleepless nights I've been granted the power of justifying my taste. It's not the same as "why" because the understanding comes from a felt sense, and then I just make up some bullshit to explain it. In this case the design isn't well composed because the removal of the background has left the logo un-grounded. The outer ring is now dominated by the letters B M W, making the design top heavy. Also worth noting is that the letters themselves are no longer balanced. The M and W are no longer the full cap-height in the center, which further unbalances the design by making it lighter to the right. The "simplicity" reduces legibility. The design is now dependent on the color of the background rather than working anywhere. Though I can't imagine a color upon which this logo would work better than the previous one. There's also an unpleasant visual ringing that occurs at hard edged transitions like the center of the checkerboard which was previously mitigated by the dividing lines.