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As the article admits - 'Although, generally, the quality of work is high...' the general quality of these designs is interesting to me. Historically, low-qual

As the article admits - 'Although, generally, the quality of work is high...' the general quality of these designs is interesting to me. Historically, low-quality art and design was a good (though certainly not conclusive) indicator of a low quality product. These days, every fly by night business can have a slick logo, every shovelware game can gleam in stills thanks to the underlying engine and every inane YouTuber has a pre-roll that could pass for a major studio. All at once barriers to entrance are lower, reach is wider and and filtering becomes much harder. Social networks and learning/recommendation features feel like logical if not simply necessary conclusions in response.

GFischer 12y ago
I think there are interesting opportunities there, for curated content :) For example, I want an equivalent of "TV channels" with varied programming for, say, Netflix, and while YouTube does have channels, it's not easy for myself to discover them (it takes a lot of time and there's no easy branding to ease the discovery process). Edit: I agree that most of those logos do look pretty good. And things like Bootstrap have lowered the barrier needed for a website to look professional. Both are good things, but make using old heuristics for filtering ineffective :)
notahacker 12y ago
Social networks and learning/recommendation features are a cause of rather than the solution to this problem. These cookie-cutter logos are churned out in "design competitions" where designers have social proof of what people actually buy and/or their peers upvote to base their designs on. The conclusion is that using the last set of successful designs as a template is far more likely to be chosen than anything genuinely original (as well as quicker to knock out when you're not being paid by the hour and the tools you have at your disposal are very conducive to tweaking). See also the dominance of the "ten reasons why this Buzzfeed article will grab more attention than your thoroughly-researched article" school of churnalism. Ultimately, lowering the barriers to becoming a gatekeeper or influencer has a far worse effect on quality than lowering the barriers to producing something vaguely competent, and both flood the market with mediocrity. On the flip-side, many well known companies spend millions on rebranding and get similarly generic logos, and ten years ago the people commissioning most of these would probably have wound up with something involving clipart.
themodelplumber 12y ago
> These days, every fly by night business can have a slick logo As a logo designer, I'm surprised at how much I think this is true but don't actually observe it much. It does happen, but the majority of businesses still seem to pay for worse logos than they deserve, and the majority of come-and-go businesses also fall into that grouping nicely. I'm learning, BTW, that even the website experience is a good gauge (well, better than a logo in significant ways) of the quality of the brand.
pm 12y ago
Honestly I think these logos are low-quality, because there is no thought put behind their creation.

GFischer 12y ago

I think there are interesting opportunities there, for curated content :) For example, I want an equivalent of "TV channels" with varied programming for, say, Netflix, and while YouTube does have channels, it's not easy for myself to discover them (it takes a lot of time and there's no easy branding to ease the discovery process). Edit: I agree that most of those logos do look pretty good. And things like Bootstrap have lowered the barrier needed for a website to look professional. Both are good things, but make using old heuristics for filtering ineffective :)

notahacker 12y ago

Social networks and learning/recommendation features are a cause of rather than the solution to this problem. These cookie-cutter logos are churned out in "design competitions" where designers have social proof of what people actually buy and/or their peers upvote to base their designs on. The conclusion is that using the last set of successful designs as a template is far more likely to be chosen than anything genuinely original (as well as quicker to knock out when you're not being paid by the hour and the tools you have at your disposal are very conducive to tweaking). See also the dominance of the "ten reasons why this Buzzfeed article will grab more attention than your thoroughly-researched article" school of churnalism. Ultimately, lowering the barriers to becoming a gatekeeper or influencer has a far worse effect on quality than lowering the barriers to producing something vaguely competent, and both flood the market with mediocrity. On the flip-side, many well known companies spend millions on rebranding and get similarly generic logos, and ten years ago the people commissioning most of these would probably have wound up with something involving clipart.

themodelplumber 12y ago

> These days, every fly by night business can have a slick logo As a logo designer, I'm surprised at how much I think this is true but don't actually observe it much. It does happen, but the majority of businesses still seem to pay for worse logos than they deserve, and the majority of come-and-go businesses also fall into that grouping nicely. I'm learning, BTW, that even the website experience is a good gauge (well, better than a logo in significant ways) of the quality of the brand.

pm 12y ago

Honestly I think these logos are low-quality, because there is no thought put behind their creation.