On logos and minimalism
This Twitter thread on What’s causing all these logos to look the same? is a thought-provoking (and short) read.
There’s not an answer in there either for what’s causing this homogenization. Maybe it’s the increased readability and accessibility of certain designs. It could even be mimetic desire. In any case, there’s a weird design trend that’s stripping out beauty, character and uniqueness from everyday life.
Two longer reads with more sinister takes on the phenomenon:
What unites Yelp, Seamless, and Venmo is, in part, their desire to monopolize particular spheres of adult life (“spaces,” in Valleyspeak). They also offer services that diminish the user’s autonomy in a way that — from a certain low angle, in a certain light — reads as patronizing when we’re supposed to be the patrons. We cannot find food on our own, or choose a restaurant, or settle a tiny debt. Where that dependency feels unseemly in the context of independent adult life, it feels appropriate if the user’s position remains childlike, and the childlikeness makes sense when you consider that Yelp depends on us to write reviews, and therefore must, like a fun mom, make chores feel fun too.
A playful interface carries a secondary benefit, because the public’s perception of the goodness or evil of a Silicon Valley company often hinges on the design of the company’s apps.
The Corporate Logo Singularity: Against the creepy cheerfulness of a thousand smiling san serifs
What we’ve been left with is the unsettling omnipresence of a single corporate aesthetic, its reach rapidly expanding beyond its tech origins. Taken individually, any of these wordmarks might effectively communicate the intended qualities of friendliness and approachability; together, their cheerfulness is downright creepy, like the painted-on smile of a clown’s face.
The central aesthetic function of the minimalist-kindergarten-utopia style is to euphemistically downplay the increasingly terrifying amount of power that multinational corporations and tech companies wield over us.
These two pieces might be a bit too dramatic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a handful of consultants wrought this change to clean up a bad imagine a few companies. And in the tech world, the homogenizing monotony did the rest. Now if you start a company without a kindergarten-safe sans-serif and cutesy animations, you’re the outlier.