Why are logos going backwards?
In March of this year (2023) Pepsi unveiled a brand new logo… that looks suspiciously like their old one. And just a couple of years ago, Burger King did the exact same thing, bravely rebranding by falling back on an older and more recognizable logo design. So what’s going on? Well, in this rat’s opinion, where else is there to go? Every brand has been going in the same direction for basically the last decade. Sans serif fonts, minimalist logos, flattened 2D designs. How many times have you opened a brand’s site and seen an oddly-proportioned, colorful vector illustration of an ambiguously gendered millennial working at a laptop or riding a bike or watering a succulent (or whatever other Human Activity for Real Humans)? Everything not only looks boring, but it’s also the same kind of boring. These brands have had only one directive, to simplify. And now that we have reached a point of diminishing returns, there’s no way out but backward, It doesn’t help that we still have no idea what the 2010s “identity” really was, and even less of an idea of where the 2020s are headed. (despite a general agreement that the world is ending) So we are returning to nostalgia, to “retro” designs. The future is scary so we are sticking with what we know. This will work for now, but how long can we keep recycling the same logos, the same media franchises, and the same songs? I hope that at least before we destroy ourselves with A.I. or atomic fire, we find a new design direction to go in.
-Brandie