11 ms·

(disclaimer: lead brand manager, been at the table of a lot of the meetings where these logo changes happen.) There's a few different reasons (especially depen

(disclaimer: lead brand manager, been at the table of a lot of the meetings where these logo changes happen.) There's a few different reasons (especially depending on the company) why that these happen, but I personally think it boils down to two unintuitive quasi-psychological reasons. - When suits are fumbling around looking for a new shiny project that'll give them a sense of "legacy" and their fingerpints all over (that won't affect immediate profits), somewhere in marketing and brand is usually the first place they'll grab. If wins, fantastic, they've secured their legacy both in a career-spanning sense and at the company itself with a bonus. If it fails disastrously, easy enough to quietly switch back to the old and to save face by tackling a different project. - Sort of relatedly, a lot of marketing suits hate feeling "left out" of trends; it's something I loathe about the industry, the hyper-focus and optimization of being at the crest of new trends (when arguably they're usually shittier than the previous ones). Oftentimes their entire salary / sense of purpose of being at the job is tied into with presenting the latest and greatest, and insecure designers will be too happy to be enablers. (My opinion may be a minority of the industry itself as if it were me, we'd be back to 90's era logos for the sheer zany quality.)

sfifs 4y ago
This is the right answer. Empirically, continuity of brand assets actually drives higher brand recognition and awareness/shoppability advantage over time, particularly for consumer goods. Look through the disastrous Tropicana branding change example for how wrong can changing familiar assets go. However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do - after all each consumer see a big brand in a branding context maybe half a dozen to a dozen times a month for a few seconds at a time in advertising or stores. The marketing teams see it every day every hour :-) So they naturally desire for change - exacerbated by the fact that the "experts" in marketing agencies or relevant in house functions have no incentive to tell them different as they make money off of the change :-)
- javajosh 4y ago
  >However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do Maybe the marketing teams from 12 big non-competing companies can "rotate" and do the work for a new company every month, coming back "home" once a year. Keep the eyes fresh.
  - twoodfin 4y ago
    This is probably a workable theory on why so many companies outsource the advertising / branding aspects of their marketing to specialized firms. (You’re also basically describing the plot structure of Mad Men!)
- nine_k 4y ago
  At this forum some like to ironically refer to things like "frontend framework of the month", meaning novelty that brings no discernible benefits at best. Apparently marketing may have it worse.
- rexpop 4y ago
  > suits are fumbling around looking for a new shiny project that'll give them a sense of "legacy" and their fingerpints all over Why?
  - defrost 4y ago
    Fear of doing nothing and somebody noticing the nothing and then firing them.
    - pmontra 4y ago
      And also they have to fill the cv with something. Somebody wrote about securing their legacy at a company. Stay two years at company X and doing only standard stuff is not a great way to get a better job somewhere else. Of course doing useless stuff should be even worse but it's hard to tell what's useful and what not.
      - chris_wot 4y ago
        Sounds like a good way of filtering out executives. If they write that they changed branding, then dock them some points…
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    It's what top managers do. New branding, merger or acquisitions, shiny new building, use the PR to move on to better job.
  - Jenk 4y ago
    You aren't a disruptor if you don't disrupt. You can't claim to be a change maker if you don't make change. You aren't a challenger if you don't challenge. Etc. Etc. etc.
thesausageking 4y ago
The most perfect example of this was when Marissa Meyer took over as CEO of Yahoo and "rolled up her sleeves" and worked with a few designers over a weekend to create a new Yahoo logo. It turned out the new logo was the old one, without serifs and more rounded and uniform.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  If the cost of that redesign was a few people for a weekend, that had to be seen as a smashing success. It's the years long process to remove serifs that are bonkers.
  - thayne 4y ago
    The cost of replacing everywhere that uses the logo, and making sure the new logo works well in all those locations is generally orders of magnitude more than coming up with the new logo. Especially if, as is often the case, they want everything to switch over to the new logo at the same time.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dieselgate 4y ago
      It’s funny to see new Taco Bells get put in and have the branding be totally different than what I remember as a kid.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    Or it was an instant destruction of value? The old logotype was great in many ways. The original "logo" of the web.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Hmm, actually looking it the 1994-1995 in Times Roman would still stand up today. The 1995-2013 look rather date design language... There might be nostalgia, but still. Some times I see point of changing it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
naniid 4y ago
This probably is the reason for why they go down the path of changing the logos. But why they look similar is because, in the past logo drafts used to be hand-drawn by artists and now its being done by digital artists who first start with available library of fonts.
- jacobsimon 4y ago
  Another important point not mentioned yet: Rebrands are rarely done internally. Companies hire external brand design agencies, and they tend to hire a few of the same well-known ones, which also set the trends for the rest of the industry. - 72andsunny (Dropbox, Instagram, eBay) - Moving Brands (Netflix, Asana, BBC, Eventbrite) - Red Antler (Casper, Alto, etc)
  - prerok 4y ago
    Right. And they want their work to be recognizable, so they would be hired by the next company, so they create similar logos :)
  - ben_w 4y ago
    So, I’m guessing that half a dozen people at those design agencies retire and we get to finally go back to some fun, playful, skeuomorphic UI? Perhaps steampunk, with AR glasses giving us notifications by ticker-tape? And 3D modeling tools that look like Bryce used to?
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Hand drawing could be in effect for logos that haven’t been redesigned in centuries. But there’s no way the first and subsequent Revolut logos have been influenced by radical tool changes. The same would go for Spotify or Yahoo, or airbnb. Also a company requesting a whimsical logo would have no difficulty having it hand drawn if it fit the bill. There’s just way less demand for that, we’d need to look at “natural” adjacent businesses to get that vibe (e.g. https://naturalhihoney.com/ https://naturalhihoney.com/ ), or restaurants.
- dagmx 4y ago
  I know people like to say "it was better in the old days" and wax nostalgic, but a lot of the logos in the before section were designed when digital tools were the norm. Even with digital tools, many designers will still sketch them out. The logo designs here are simply following what's on trend, rather than a reflection of tooling changes.
pcurve 4y ago
Sometimes loyal consumers fight back and win. https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/ https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro... Dropbox rebrand was panned as well. https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/11/dropbox-rebrand-logo-visual-identity-graphic-design/ https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/11/dropbox-rebrand-logo-visua...
tomc1985 4y ago
It is absolutely disgusting how much gets done in this world simply because someone needed to stroke their ego. Legacies, bonuses... pah. Pathetic how predictably selfish we humans really are. What really strikes me is the lack of customer centricity in all this. Do they want the change? Do they think the existing look is outdated? Do they like the old look? Pah. Who cares! I have a legacy to cement and a bonus to secure! (Besides the usual MBA word-vomit mumbo jumbo like 'modern utility', but we all know those are just made up excuses) Maybe a brand should just be... a brand. A brand isn't your friend, it isn't human, it isn't alive, and it most certainly only exists to take your money and put it in their account -- and, in tech, more often than not through some rent-seeking subscription model because nobody likes us actually owning anything anymore.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  It is confusing to me: a brand at its very core is ego and legacy. That ego and legacy happen to be shared among a whole company, but it’s 100% a “we vs the others”, and the history behind the identity. What you seem to be looking for is not a brand but a label or a certification perhaps ?
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    Feeling, maybe, but only because it is intentionally cultivated to be so. Large shifts in company branding don't usual signal an equally large shift in the company's culture, though they might say otherwise. If IKEA or Apple suddenly changed their aesthetic, they are probably going to be pushing out the same products... just with different packaging. The companies themselves remain the same as they were. People will have different feelings, depending on their reaction and how the branding people message this change, but ultimately the move is pointless as everything continues as before. For an extreme example, look at the Blackwaters or Facebooks of the world.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      I’d argue branding and company culture are independent only if branding is weak in the first place. Apple has a very strong brand, and if tomorrow they switched their logo and brand image to a cursive Ford style blue one it would need a strong justification behind it, a ton of employees would see such a change in a very negative way, and possibility think long and hard about their career path going from there, as the management might have lost their way. Or the other way: when “Apple Computers” became “Apple” it wasn’t some random surface level change, but a reflection of how the company had deeply changed focus compared to its earlier days. Branding and culture are rarely decoupled, and if any of those are strong enough they’ll change in lockstep. PS: on brand and logo “refreshes”, like Peugeot moving to more a stylized lion, while those are arguably cosmetic, there is the same philosophy applied to the worker pool with “new blood” introduced to the company and processes and manufacturing moving along. In a way, the same thing is happening below and above the surface.
yonrg 4y ago
Humans :eyeroll: Changes make or should make the impression of progress.
ehnto 4y ago
> Sort of relatedly, a lot of marketing suits hate feeling "left out" of trends; Oh yeah definitely related, it's an existential crisis for marketing/media to not be producing something new. To be fair to them, software developers are worse I feel. If these industries were pragmatic, there'd be far less work to do. Instead, we re-brand/re-build every year, lest we all lose our purpose and our jobs.
irrational 4y ago
This answer agrees with my experience. Business people want to redesign sites, logos, etc. because it gives them something to do, gives them something to report and show to their higher ups, makes them feel useful, allows them to expense field “research” trips, allows them to expense offsite meetings with design consultants, allows them to do something fun instead of focusing on their real, but harder, business priorities, etc.
2-718-281-828 4y ago
I fail to see how this explains anything about why brands change their main logo to the same dull style.
- sumedh 4y ago
  Play safe, if you come up with a wacky logo and it fails then your reputation suffers.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Generally there is design language for every decade or more. Not following this unless it is sufficiently old or well established just looks dated in a wrong way.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  I work in the UX space. My team presents new designs and features to customers before building them. We actually sit 1 on 1 with a customer and show them mockups and such of some future idea for the product. One of the questions asked to customers is something to the effect of, "Looking at design A, would you say it looks more or less 'modern' than design B?" This is usually the justification higher ups use for making these changes. I'm not saying this is a good way of product direction (do customers really know what they want?) but this is usually how the justification happens.
smcg 4y ago
Sounds like they provide negative value to the company. They are subsidized by the people who actually do work.
b112 4y ago
The sad part is, I have literally lost brands. Just entirely been unsure what I used to buy, because I buy based upon look, not just on product name. EG, I buy battered fish in a blue box, the box disappeared from my main grocery store. When I went to my less visited store, it was gone there too. Literally, I just picked a random replacement brand. Another thing which gets me, is marketers think everyone buys things weekly. And I once noticed a product I was hunting for with "New look!" on the box, but if was the last of the "New look!" boxes, the ones behind tem were missing the pronouncement. I'm buying fish sticks here, and I do so once every 6 months, and throw a bunch of boxes in my deep freeze. I'm not tied into what "exciting change" some yahoo thinks their product is going through, nothing is exciting about the food I buy, I just want fish sticks. The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish. UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.
- b112 4y ago
  Oh, and don't get me started on flavour or product change. I don't want "new and improved". Stop it! Leave my tasty thing alone. The number of times I've changed brands, and never gone back, because "improved"... And the worst, I buy frozen pizza. Unlike my fellow shoppers, I buy for the best crust flavour, and only meat. Why? Because if you want good frozen pizza, buy great crust, meat only, the put fresh veggies on it! Meat freezes well, not so much veggies. Lately, one brand has added "croissant crust" and also "cheese in crust", and unless a supermarket is the size of all creation, it doesn't have room for one brand with 8 types, by 3 styles. The result? The best crust, without extra calories(cheese), is now impossible to find. I had to switch brands. Just stop it ffs!
  - pindab0ter 4y ago
    I’ve always thought a lot of ‘improvements’ are really cost savings while trying to maintain the quality of the product or change it a little so it isn’t noticed as much; “It’s better, so if you don’t like it that’s on you.”
    - 4y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
While I totally agree that logos tend to be changed far too early and too often, at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving. For example, the quirky eBay logo was a great fit for a startup during the dot com boom, but the way typical websites look changed dramatically since then and the company became much bigger and professional. At some point, a logo that doesn't get updated does start screaming "this is a company stuck in a time several decades ago".
- virtualritz 4y ago
  Ex typographer and logo designer here (I didn't work in that profession since 25years but I know a bit a about it). > [...] at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving. This is simply not true. If your logo looks outdated, 10 years in, it was never a good logo to start with. Logos need to be timeless. They also need to to be recognizable though. These are difficult to align constraints and only a tiny fraction of logo designers manage to produce logos that satisfy both. Otherwise I agree 100% with parent. Suits meddling in affairs they have no clue of. Been there and seen that at two companies with previously good logos.
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    There is nothing wrong with the old Burberry and Yves St Lauren logos.
  - watwut 4y ago
    This kind of like saying refactoring is about bored programmers stroking egos, because if you need to refactor, original code was not good to begin with.
    - virtualritz 4y ago
      TLDR; Comparing code reviews to logo redesign is comparing apples to oranges. Both are about change – as is caring for your newborn when it shat it's diapers. Or another one: it's like me saying what you said is like saying 'Penne Arrabiata' is a dish "that needs revisiting" because it hasn't been changed since yonx. Millions of Italians would beg to differ. ;)
dalbasal 4y ago
It's also fun, easy and exceptionally easy to spend a precise budgetary on a branding exercise. Marketing these days is full of technical details. Digital campaign statistics. CRM. Automation. Tiny optimisations, analytics and such. Branding lets everyone be involved. Everyone can have a say. A logo change rarely succeeds or fails. You don't have to know anything to make decisions or sound smart. Everyone notices it. Crusty old board members notice, and might comment on the work. Etc. It's high visibility, low effort, low stress, low bar work. I'm not implying that great branding doesn't exist. Most of the examples here though... they just changed fonts to whatever is most fashionable now.
greenthrow 4y ago
> (disclaimer: lead brand manager, been at the table of a lot of the meetings where these logo changes happen.) This is not a disclaimer. This is, in fact, the opposite of a disclaimer. It is a "claimer", if you will, claiming experience and authority on the topic. A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut."
- rocketbop 4y ago
  Yes, it's rather a source
- ttgurney 4y ago
  > A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut." I believe the word you both are looking for is "disclosure": https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115850/disclaimer-vs-disclosure https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115850/disclaime...
  - greenthrow 4y ago
    No, I was not looking for a different word. Yes, disclosures are one reason for a disclaimer, and the example I gave is one. But you might also do a disclaimer like "I have no first hand experience, but many friends have told me..." again, a disclaimer is exactly as I said, reasons to take the information with a grain of salt or to be aware of the limitations (e.g. legal disclaimers like on prescription medicine commercials.)
cyanydeez 4y ago
I think number 2 is too grandiose. It's probably closer to "change == growth || progress"
ratww 4y ago
It’s funny how it’s the “suits” that are the money burners and productivity destroyers. While individual contributors are left to obsess about productivity. A sign that we all can afford to collectively slow down.
xorcist 4y ago
It's all good and well blaming "the suits", but the same thing happens with the techies. How many working products haven't been rebuilt just to incorporate some tech du jour? The fact that a good number of people gets fresh CVs in the process is never held against it.

sfifs 4y ago

This is the right answer. Empirically, continuity of brand assets actually drives higher brand recognition and awareness/shoppability advantage over time, particularly for consumer goods. Look through the disastrous Tropicana branding change example for how wrong can changing familiar assets go. However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do - after all each consumer see a big brand in a branding context maybe half a dozen to a dozen times a month for a few seconds at a time in advertising or stores. The marketing teams see it every day every hour :-) So they naturally desire for change - exacerbated by the fact that the "experts" in marketing agencies or relevant in house functions have no incentive to tell them different as they make money off of the change :-)

javajosh 4y ago
>However, the marketing teams get bored of their branding and ads way way before consumers do Maybe the marketing teams from 12 big non-competing companies can "rotate" and do the work for a new company every month, coming back "home" once a year. Keep the eyes fresh.
- twoodfin 4y ago
  This is probably a workable theory on why so many companies outsource the advertising / branding aspects of their marketing to specialized firms. (You’re also basically describing the plot structure of Mad Men!)
nine_k 4y ago
At this forum some like to ironically refer to things like "frontend framework of the month", meaning novelty that brings no discernible benefits at best. Apparently marketing may have it worse.
rexpop 4y ago
> suits are fumbling around looking for a new shiny project that'll give them a sense of "legacy" and their fingerpints all over Why?
- defrost 4y ago
  Fear of doing nothing and somebody noticing the nothing and then firing them.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    And also they have to fill the cv with something. Somebody wrote about securing their legacy at a company. Stay two years at company X and doing only standard stuff is not a great way to get a better job somewhere else. Of course doing useless stuff should be even worse but it's hard to tell what's useful and what not.
    - chris_wot 4y ago
      Sounds like a good way of filtering out executives. If they write that they changed branding, then dock them some points…
- Scarblac 4y ago
  It's what top managers do. New branding, merger or acquisitions, shiny new building, use the PR to move on to better job.
- Jenk 4y ago
  You aren't a disruptor if you don't disrupt. You can't claim to be a change maker if you don't make change. You aren't a challenger if you don't challenge. Etc. Etc. etc.

thesausageking 4y ago

The most perfect example of this was when Marissa Meyer took over as CEO of Yahoo and "rolled up her sleeves" and worked with a few designers over a weekend to create a new Yahoo logo. It turned out the new logo was the old one, without serifs and more rounded and uniform.

boomboomsubban 4y ago
If the cost of that redesign was a few people for a weekend, that had to be seen as a smashing success. It's the years long process to remove serifs that are bonkers.
- thayne 4y ago
  The cost of replacing everywhere that uses the logo, and making sure the new logo works well in all those locations is generally orders of magnitude more than coming up with the new logo. Especially if, as is often the case, they want everything to switch over to the new logo at the same time.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dieselgate 4y ago
    It’s funny to see new Taco Bells get put in and have the branding be totally different than what I remember as a kid.
- yobbo 4y ago
  Or it was an instant destruction of value? The old logotype was great in many ways. The original "logo" of the web.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Hmm, actually looking it the 1994-1995 in Times Roman would still stand up today. The 1995-2013 look rather date design language... There might be nostalgia, but still. Some times I see point of changing it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

naniid 4y ago

This probably is the reason for why they go down the path of changing the logos. But why they look similar is because, in the past logo drafts used to be hand-drawn by artists and now its being done by digital artists who first start with available library of fonts.

jacobsimon 4y ago
Another important point not mentioned yet: Rebrands are rarely done internally. Companies hire external brand design agencies, and they tend to hire a few of the same well-known ones, which also set the trends for the rest of the industry. - 72andsunny (Dropbox, Instagram, eBay) - Moving Brands (Netflix, Asana, BBC, Eventbrite) - Red Antler (Casper, Alto, etc)
- prerok 4y ago
  Right. And they want their work to be recognizable, so they would be hired by the next company, so they create similar logos :)
- ben_w 4y ago
  So, I’m guessing that half a dozen people at those design agencies retire and we get to finally go back to some fun, playful, skeuomorphic UI? Perhaps steampunk, with AR glasses giving us notifications by ticker-tape? And 3D modeling tools that look like Bryce used to?
makeitdouble 4y ago
Hand drawing could be in effect for logos that haven’t been redesigned in centuries. But there’s no way the first and subsequent Revolut logos have been influenced by radical tool changes. The same would go for Spotify or Yahoo, or airbnb. Also a company requesting a whimsical logo would have no difficulty having it hand drawn if it fit the bill. There’s just way less demand for that, we’d need to look at “natural” adjacent businesses to get that vibe (e.g. https://naturalhihoney.com/ https://naturalhihoney.com/ ), or restaurants.
dagmx 4y ago
I know people like to say "it was better in the old days" and wax nostalgic, but a lot of the logos in the before section were designed when digital tools were the norm. Even with digital tools, many designers will still sketch them out. The logo designs here are simply following what's on trend, rather than a reflection of tooling changes.

pcurve 4y ago

Sometimes loyal consumers fight back and win. https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/ https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro... Dropbox rebrand was panned as well. https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/11/dropbox-rebrand-logo-visual-identity-graphic-design/ https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/11/dropbox-rebrand-logo-visua...

tomc1985 4y ago

It is absolutely disgusting how much gets done in this world simply because someone needed to stroke their ego. Legacies, bonuses... pah. Pathetic how predictably selfish we humans really are. What really strikes me is the lack of customer centricity in all this. Do they want the change? Do they think the existing look is outdated? Do they like the old look? Pah. Who cares! I have a legacy to cement and a bonus to secure! (Besides the usual MBA word-vomit mumbo jumbo like 'modern utility', but we all know those are just made up excuses) Maybe a brand should just be... a brand. A brand isn't your friend, it isn't human, it isn't alive, and it most certainly only exists to take your money and put it in their account -- and, in tech, more often than not through some rent-seeking subscription model because nobody likes us actually owning anything anymore.

makeitdouble 4y ago
It is confusing to me: a brand at its very core is ego and legacy. That ego and legacy happen to be shared among a whole company, but it’s 100% a “we vs the others”, and the history behind the identity. What you seem to be looking for is not a brand but a label or a certification perhaps ?
- tomc1985 4y ago
  Feeling, maybe, but only because it is intentionally cultivated to be so. Large shifts in company branding don't usual signal an equally large shift in the company's culture, though they might say otherwise. If IKEA or Apple suddenly changed their aesthetic, they are probably going to be pushing out the same products... just with different packaging. The companies themselves remain the same as they were. People will have different feelings, depending on their reaction and how the branding people message this change, but ultimately the move is pointless as everything continues as before. For an extreme example, look at the Blackwaters or Facebooks of the world.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I’d argue branding and company culture are independent only if branding is weak in the first place. Apple has a very strong brand, and if tomorrow they switched their logo and brand image to a cursive Ford style blue one it would need a strong justification behind it, a ton of employees would see such a change in a very negative way, and possibility think long and hard about their career path going from there, as the management might have lost their way. Or the other way: when “Apple Computers” became “Apple” it wasn’t some random surface level change, but a reflection of how the company had deeply changed focus compared to its earlier days. Branding and culture are rarely decoupled, and if any of those are strong enough they’ll change in lockstep. PS: on brand and logo “refreshes”, like Peugeot moving to more a stylized lion, while those are arguably cosmetic, there is the same philosophy applied to the worker pool with “new blood” introduced to the company and processes and manufacturing moving along. In a way, the same thing is happening below and above the surface.

yonrg 4y ago

Humans :eyeroll: Changes make or should make the impression of progress.

ehnto 4y ago

> Sort of relatedly, a lot of marketing suits hate feeling "left out" of trends; Oh yeah definitely related, it's an existential crisis for marketing/media to not be producing something new. To be fair to them, software developers are worse I feel. If these industries were pragmatic, there'd be far less work to do. Instead, we re-brand/re-build every year, lest we all lose our purpose and our jobs.

irrational 4y ago

This answer agrees with my experience. Business people want to redesign sites, logos, etc. because it gives them something to do, gives them something to report and show to their higher ups, makes them feel useful, allows them to expense field “research” trips, allows them to expense offsite meetings with design consultants, allows them to do something fun instead of focusing on their real, but harder, business priorities, etc.

2-718-281-828 4y ago

I fail to see how this explains anything about why brands change their main logo to the same dull style.

sumedh 4y ago
Play safe, if you come up with a wacky logo and it fails then your reputation suffers.
Ekaros 4y ago
Generally there is design language for every decade or more. Not following this unless it is sufficiently old or well established just looks dated in a wrong way.
wildrhythms 4y ago
I work in the UX space. My team presents new designs and features to customers before building them. We actually sit 1 on 1 with a customer and show them mockups and such of some future idea for the product. One of the questions asked to customers is something to the effect of, "Looking at design A, would you say it looks more or less 'modern' than design B?" This is usually the justification higher ups use for making these changes. I'm not saying this is a good way of product direction (do customers really know what they want?) but this is usually how the justification happens.

smcg 4y ago

Sounds like they provide negative value to the company. They are subsidized by the people who actually do work.

b112 4y ago

The sad part is, I have literally lost brands. Just entirely been unsure what I used to buy, because I buy based upon look, not just on product name. EG, I buy battered fish in a blue box, the box disappeared from my main grocery store. When I went to my less visited store, it was gone there too. Literally, I just picked a random replacement brand. Another thing which gets me, is marketers think everyone buys things weekly. And I once noticed a product I was hunting for with "New look!" on the box, but if was the last of the "New look!" boxes, the ones behind tem were missing the pronouncement. I'm buying fish sticks here, and I do so once every 6 months, and throw a bunch of boxes in my deep freeze. I'm not tied into what "exciting change" some yahoo thinks their product is going through, nothing is exciting about the food I buy, I just want fish sticks. The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish. UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.

b112 4y ago
Oh, and don't get me started on flavour or product change. I don't want "new and improved". Stop it! Leave my tasty thing alone. The number of times I've changed brands, and never gone back, because "improved"... And the worst, I buy frozen pizza. Unlike my fellow shoppers, I buy for the best crust flavour, and only meat. Why? Because if you want good frozen pizza, buy great crust, meat only, the put fresh veggies on it! Meat freezes well, not so much veggies. Lately, one brand has added "croissant crust" and also "cheese in crust", and unless a supermarket is the size of all creation, it doesn't have room for one brand with 8 types, by 3 styles. The result? The best crust, without extra calories(cheese), is now impossible to find. I had to switch brands. Just stop it ffs!
- pindab0ter 4y ago
  I’ve always thought a lot of ‘improvements’ are really cost savings while trying to maintain the quality of the product or change it a little so it isn’t noticed as much; “It’s better, so if you don’t like it that’s on you.”
  - 4y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

While I totally agree that logos tend to be changed far too early and too often, at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving. For example, the quirky eBay logo was a great fit for a startup during the dot com boom, but the way typical websites look changed dramatically since then and the company became much bigger and professional. At some point, a logo that doesn't get updated does start screaming "this is a company stuck in a time several decades ago".

virtualritz 4y ago
Ex typographer and logo designer here (I didn't work in that profession since 25years but I know a bit a about it). > [...] at some point the logos do start to look outdated, either because the company evolves or because the world is moving. This is simply not true. If your logo looks outdated, 10 years in, it was never a good logo to start with. Logos need to be timeless. They also need to to be recognizable though. These are difficult to align constraints and only a tiny fraction of logo designers manage to produce logos that satisfy both. Otherwise I agree 100% with parent. Suits meddling in affairs they have no clue of. Been there and seen that at two companies with previously good logos.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  There is nothing wrong with the old Burberry and Yves St Lauren logos.
- watwut 4y ago
  This kind of like saying refactoring is about bored programmers stroking egos, because if you need to refactor, original code was not good to begin with.
  - virtualritz 4y ago
    TLDR; Comparing code reviews to logo redesign is comparing apples to oranges. Both are about change – as is caring for your newborn when it shat it's diapers. Or another one: it's like me saying what you said is like saying 'Penne Arrabiata' is a dish "that needs revisiting" because it hasn't been changed since yonx. Millions of Italians would beg to differ. ;)

dalbasal 4y ago

It's also fun, easy and exceptionally easy to spend a precise budgetary on a branding exercise. Marketing these days is full of technical details. Digital campaign statistics. CRM. Automation. Tiny optimisations, analytics and such. Branding lets everyone be involved. Everyone can have a say. A logo change rarely succeeds or fails. You don't have to know anything to make decisions or sound smart. Everyone notices it. Crusty old board members notice, and might comment on the work. Etc. It's high visibility, low effort, low stress, low bar work. I'm not implying that great branding doesn't exist. Most of the examples here though... they just changed fonts to whatever is most fashionable now.

greenthrow 4y ago

> (disclaimer: lead brand manager, been at the table of a lot of the meetings where these logo changes happen.) This is not a disclaimer. This is, in fact, the opposite of a disclaimer. It is a "claimer", if you will, claiming experience and authority on the topic. A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut."

rocketbop 4y ago
Yes, it's rather a source
ttgurney 4y ago
> A disclaimer is when you state a reason why people might want to discount your opinion, usually due to a conflict of interest. E.g., "I work at Revolut." I believe the word you both are looking for is "disclosure": https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115850/disclaimer-vs-disclosure https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/115850/disclaime...
- greenthrow 4y ago
  No, I was not looking for a different word. Yes, disclosures are one reason for a disclaimer, and the example I gave is one. But you might also do a disclaimer like "I have no first hand experience, but many friends have told me..." again, a disclaimer is exactly as I said, reasons to take the information with a grain of salt or to be aware of the limitations (e.g. legal disclaimers like on prescription medicine commercials.)

cyanydeez 4y ago

I think number 2 is too grandiose. It's probably closer to "change == growth || progress"

ratww 4y ago

It’s funny how it’s the “suits” that are the money burners and productivity destroyers. While individual contributors are left to obsess about productivity. A sign that we all can afford to collectively slow down.

xorcist 4y ago

It's all good and well blaming "the suits", but the same thing happens with the techies. How many working products haven't been rebuilt just to incorporate some tech du jour? The fact that a good number of people gets fresh CVs in the process is never held against it.