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Something that’s becoming increasingly disconcerting to me is when a major corporation decides they need a “rebrand”. More often than not, a classic, beautifully designed mark meets its demise (changing the wonderful, simple Ducati logo especially saddens me).

There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of nip/tuck to update a logo that’s outdated (Econo Lodge) or to fix an already ugly one (the new Barclaycard may be a rip-off, but that old one is just plain bad). The problem here is that many of these expensive redesigns just follow the same trendy, design-by-committee formula: “Lowercase is friendlier! make it shiny! make it spin! it’s gotta move!”

The make-over usually results in some sort of bubbly, lozenge-looking thing that doesn’t even add value to the brand. In fact, I’d argue it’s doing more harm than good, either by neutering a brilliant design (Paul Rand’s UPS), diluting interesting type (CNET), looking like a copy-cat (Barclaycard), speaking to the wrong audience (c’mon, Adobe, we’re designers) or causing confusion (does Xerox make Xboxes now?). With all the shiny marbles out there, one would think the new “it” market are five-year-olds. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t choose my phone provider based on how totally 3-D their logo is.

I think that old saying about not fixing unbroke things applies here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Branding, Design, brand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.