Why Redesign?
I’m sure by now you’ve more than likely heard all about how “the old logo was better” or how “Company X has RUINED their whole brand". I’m guilty of it myself to be honest, but truthfully, it gets a bit old, and I’m almost positive you’re tired of hearing it.
So I’m going to tell you why this is good actually…
The biggest reason mainly comes down to computers. Anyone who’s ever worked on a computer can tell you that computer’s LOVE boxes. In a computers world, a shape with 4 sides and 90 degree corners would be as good as sliced bread; mere perfection. So when we see these redesigns like Jaguar, FGCU, and Pizza Hut. they’re all following the same ideology; digital first. When you are designing a logo for something that likes squares, why fight it? Everyone has a phone these days, and everyone is a QR code away from visiting your website. Having that original offset logo, tilted to the side, creates a large gap on all ends. This add unwanted negative space to the header and makes the design have a lot of negative space. Let alone trying to line up a button on any side of this monster of a logo.
To our next point, ink is expensive to buy. Very expensive. So expensive, it’s actually more valuable than gold when you get down to a gram vs gram price. Big, colorful, flashy logo’s are expensive to print as you can imagine. But what really is the difference? If you go to my page, you’ll see a detail on the flying fireman shirt. That shirt cost me $14 in ink, PER SHIRT. Not only did it need a metric ton of ink in all the fun colors of the rainbow, but it also required the printing shop to re-calibrate their printers so they could print the finer details required. Lets compare that to a simple 2-solid solid text on background shirt. 5$. You heard that right, five whole legendary dollars, a mere 33% of the cost compared to the fancy design. Money talks, and when FGCU has to print 10000 shirts for the book store, the difference is spending 140000 to 50000, and they’ll take the 50 grand every single time as a business.
Finally, the third biggest reason is because its a timeless clean look. Some say that older logos will depreciate with time, will show their age and, by extension, date the company to a different bygone era. My favorite example has to be Chuck E Cheese. They were a once thriving company, packed with the hottest electronic games and the coolest robots… but when you see that logo, what exactly do you think? Because I’m willing to bet its not cutting edge technology. In fact, what logo are you thinking of? They’ve changed their logo 11 times in the companies history to date. Remarkably, after 11 tries they still manage to feel old, which might be more impressive than the point i was trying to make initially. Regardless, these are just some of the key reasons why we have these “bad” logo redesigns, maybe you’ll warm up to them one day. I sure won’t.
