Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Hard, hard disagree. This good article has been discussed before on HN: https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-...

It's not just a "perceived" loss of individuality. The new logos discussed in that linked article, especially the fashion ones, suck in my opinion because they're boring and they all look the same. They at least used to have some good degree of variability.

View on HN

Hm, the first example - Revolut. The fact that the author thinks the original logo was recognizable or had any character is very questionable.

Revolut was founded in 2015, the time when a huge number of startups (including my own) had blue logos with a light gradient. This is such a cliche logo that it's almost laughable to even take seriously. Do you not remember 2015 and the wave of blue tech logos?

The point isn’t that the old logo was good, they include a similar AirBnb one on that list, the point is pure black is even less distinctive.

The new logo is objectively less distinctive as a shorter sentence can completely describe it.

Less distinctive than what? The original logo was a trend with thousands of logos looking like generic versions of each other. Was Revolut's logo distinctive back then? No. Then years later many logos followed a new trend and became another flavor of "not distinctive". I am not saying that old or new logo is better: they are all pretty generic. Always have been. We only recognize them as having character when we look at past iterations because we are so used to the current ones. Saying that, in my view the old logo was really ugly. The new one is just really generic.

Both logos include the same word in a uniform font which cancels out in the comparison.

However, there are objectively millions of ways to setup a blue color gradient around white letters that all look the same. There is exactly one way to have a pure black font.

Therefore the second logo is objectively less distinctive.

There is no objective way to evaluate this. It’s always in relation to something else. If we take 1000 blue logos (with different gradients and letter arrangement) and compare them to this single black logo: the black logo will be _objectively_ more distinctive.

There is nothing objective in picking some specific subset of logos for comparison vs all possible logos

You created a subjective measurement.

Variation does not equal distinction. You can have millions of gradients around white letters which will not be perceived by anyone as distinctive. On the other hand you can have black letters arranged in a million ways that will look distinctive. It's all a subjective selection.

There is an infinite number of ways to design a black logo. There is an infinite number of ways to design a blue logo. So which infinity has more distinctive logos?

Not all infinites are the same size, but that’s irrelevant as there are only a finite number of perceivably distinct logos.

Anyway, for any distinct set of black logos you can map them to a larger set of blue gradient labels therefore the number of distinct blue logos with gradients is larger.

Design is of course a fashion business like most things.

That said, a lot of traditional logos had a huge amount of fine detail that doesn't work well on mobile. While not the only factor, it's at least one motivator for a lot of the rebranding/logo redesigns that you're seeing.

I don't really buy that. I mean, maybe with older phones. But I guarantee 98% of people buying Balenciaga or YSL or Diane von Fürstenberg have an iPhone that is more than capable of displaying extremely fine detail very well.

That screens are (in many cases) very high res these days doesn't mean that the eyes looking at a small screen are. The irony is that many of the same designers who are coming up with simple unadorned logos are also fond of tiny grey text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com