The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
Logos don't need to be readable. Logos need to be instantly, and unmistakably recognizable. McDonald's logo is the big yellow M. It's not "readable", because it's not a word. But, the entire world instantly recognizes the logo, regardless of whether they can read English.
I agree with OP, they're doing a disservice to themselves by simplifying their logos to plain text.
they’re doing a disservice to themselves by simplifying their logos to plain text.
It also dilutes their branding when translated into different languages/writing scripts.
That McDonald's 'M' is instantly recognizable in every language, even languages that don't use Latin-derived letters.
But if your logo is plain text, how do you translate it into Cyrillic or Kanji? You either have to develop a completely new logo for those regions (hurting your worldwide recognizability) or you just roll with the English logo and have to deal with most of the locals seeing it as completely unintelligible.
Logos don’t need to be readable.
Completely depends on the circumstance. Do logos of global icons like McDonald's, Apple or Volkswagen's need to be readable? No. Of course not because they're everywhere. Does your local electrician's logo need to be readable because it's literally just their family name? Yes. Yes, it absolutely needs to be readable.
Fashions are cyclical and ornamentation and busy-ness will become popular again someday.
I hope you're right but I'm not sure it's really as set in stone as you make it sound.
Its a pretty well documented phenomena
Generation A does something a certain way
Generation B rejects their parents' taste, does the thing a different way
Generation C goes "there was some good stuff back in A's day, maybe we shouldn't write them off completely" and boom we're wearing bell bottoms in the 90s
Why do we still have mom jeans then, no one looks good in them
We don’t still have mom jeans. We have mom jeans again, supporting kobold’s point.
I'm not sure it's really applicable here. What I'm seeing in this picture is not an evolution from "Style A" to "Style B", it's more like an evolution from lots of diverse logos to a completely uniform design across the industry. It's not an evolution from one style to another, but more like a consolidation from unique logos to sameness.
I have a hard time seeing them diversifying again. Maybe someone will change but then the others might just follow suite.
Until eventually enough execs get tired of it and demand busier logos because itll catch attention
Every CEO of every one of these shit merchants signed off on millions of dollars of expenditures to implement these rebrandings after being sold the idea by bullshit merchants.
That's why they deserve the big bucks I suppose.
That's really what rankles the most.
These fuckers paid millions for some designer to come up with "let's just type the name of the company in a super-boring font".
in a super-boring font
And they probably also paid a type foundry a fuckload of money to create that super-boring font for their exclusive use.
after being sold the idea by bullshit merchants.
You're giving media agencies too much credit. At some point many years ago simplicity and blandness became the thing every CEO was chasing after. Most designers are long ready to move on but board members and CEOs are too risk averse to try anything new. They all want what everyone else has.
They're risk averse because the whole game is "get overpaid to run the business, then hire overpaid consultants to tell you how to run the business", because (and this is my own insane thought) they're trying to recreate a class of hereditary nobility which consists of those who lead because they are rich, and qualifications do not matter. It's not just logos, it's everything about such enterprises. These parasites are robbing both shareholders and workers. This is why the only two industries left in America are fraud and gambling.
If I ever start a business, I'm hiring the Rockstar North artist who did all the fake business logos that look like dick and balls from GTA. Start selling actual Giggle Cream.
We did bully Cracker Barrel to put the *ahem* white man back.
Cracker Barrel took the cracker and the barrel off of their sign. Didn't make sense.
ORDER CRACKER BARGLE?
I think you're missing the point.
There's a logo and there's the brand text. You posted the brand text. You didn't post the logo.
These are logotypes, also known as wordmarks. That is a kind of logo. At least, that is what they are called by the graphic designers who create them.
It’s also, by definition, not enshitification.
Uh okay, substitute "logo" with "brand text", isn't the point the same? There used to be a variety of designs and now it's all the same and boring.
All of these corporations should be dismantled. And no, I couldn’t care less about their fucking logos.
They probably all have the same consultancy groups making the same decisions. How dare they not conform to the market or the competition and stand out.
Just wait until LLMs are used to design most of them - they will be distinctively average.
The Facebook one isn't true, the one on the right was the logo of the company before it rebranded to Meta. The one for the social media platform still looks similar to the one on the left.
Corporate logos undergo a vacillation between flat and aero every few decades. Just look at the Pepsi logo for example. Its part of the whole soulless pandering philosophy they have going on.
The logo is a way to present your brand. If the logo is bland, by extension you expect the brand to also be. And if the brand is expected to be bland, and if the company wants it and/or the profits still come, there is not reason forcing the company to try to be better.
This post seems extremely cherry picked to me. There are more than 20 brands. I picked 5 on my mind from tech: Logitech (stylized g still)
Framework (boring in roughly the same was as in the post; always has been?)
Anthropic (stylized A)
Amazon (still the smiling arrow)
Apple (still the prominent apple logo)
I don't think this is a fad. And if it were a fad, it looks like intentional effort towards readability to me, which wouldn't be enshittification imo.
ah dude don't get me started how all the logos on my apps now look the same. it's at the point where I often don't even bother searching for the icon anymore, because odds are even if I find it, they've changed it just enough to not be recognizable
TBF, readability is a big plus for marketing, no?
Are these readable though, when everyone looks the same? At this point it's not really a recognizable logo as much as it's just a name written in text that you just have to read in order to know what the brand even is. You used to be able to visually recognize the brand based on the appearance of the logo, without even reading the name.
Kia went into a different direction but I still don't like it.
First time I saw it I thought it was a car manufacturer I've never seen
It looks like the Nine Inch Nails NIN to me... And whenever I see a Kia Telluride I start singing "Terrible Lie" but I substitute Telluride.
Kia's Logo Is So Confusing That 30K People Google 'KN Car' Every Month - https://www.thedrive.com/news/kias-logo-is-so-confusing-that-30k-people-google-kn-car-every-month
With the slightly older logo, it's would read KIL, if people read Greek.
Had the same reaction to the newest logo but maybe that was the point from a marketing perspective.
Wow that original logo is pretty cool. The new one just looks like "KN".
To be fair the Meta logo actually has graphical elements unlike the Facebook one. And that's about everything positive you will hear me say about Meta. I wouldn't be surprised if they ditched that logo for a butthole like all the other AI companies.
Ads even more unwanted
Pinterest, Burberry, and Rimowa all got major downgrades. A bunch of the others weren't very legible before or were kind of a jumbled/weird or also boring typeface (and so replacing with another boring typeface doesn't really matter)
Airbnb & Revolut looked like somebody did it with chatgpt on fiverr
Spotify looked goofy
Yves Saint Laurent was almost good but the kerning was atrocious
Berluti & balmain were just different boring fonts. Counterpoint: facebook, balenciaga were also just boring fonts but looked way better than the new boring font
At least they were unique, but they kinda sucked too
eBay was basically a captcha.
Absolutely. Marketers periodically do something new to stand out, and if it works they imitate each other for a while. Right now it's boring text. Someday it'll be grafitti spraypaint fonts.
Boring logos are easier to tune out. So I'm not sad abt this.