Is this a familiar scenario? You’ve seen a company announce a brand new logo and your first thought is “why does this look so boring, it looked so much better before”
The reason why modern logos look so boring is that graphic design has evolved a lot over the past few years, And these logos reflect the needs of businesses and their consumers more.
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Once you see the actual reasons why logos are so simple nowadays, you may have a better understanding of why graphic designers and companies have gone in this direction.
Why Modern Logos Are the Way They Are
Here are the top 10 reasons why modern logos look so boring to us, from how they started to change to why they look the way they do now.
1. They Emphasize Simplicity for Users
Modern logos keep things simple for people to reduce the amount of information they have to process. This means that consumers should be able to identify the logo at a glimpse. This is why many companies have shifted to plain colors and distinct shapes in their logos compared to the intricate designs used previously. They keep logos plain so that you don’t have to think when you look at it
2. They Appear Uniform Everywhere
Nowadays, you can see a logo everywhere, from billboards, to commercials, to the homepage on your phone. A logo has to appear consistent in all these places because there’s no telling where a logo could appear on what kind of screen or surface. Therefore, the simpler a logo is, the less likely it appears out of place. The last thing a business wants is for their logo to appear distorted in a place where people will see it.
3. They Appear Consistent With Other Brands
Sometimes, companies collaborate or share space with other logos. Like on your phone screen, you have different logos from different companies appearing in a row, and there are standards for that. If a logo was stylized so differently than everything else around it, it could be distracting. It’s not always a good thing to stand out, sometimes If an element is too distracting users will gloss over it because it looks unnatural, this could actually drive people away from the brand instead of to it.
4. They Are More Memorable
As busy humans, we must process a lot of information every day. Take a wild guess how many logos you’ve seen today alone, it’s probably not even close to the actual amount because you might have forgotten some.
A company can make their logo stick in your mind by removing distracting elements. Therefore, you’re more likely to remember simple logos, and that’s what businesses want, for their brand to appear in your mind every time you think about a product or service they provide.
5. More Room for Artistic Interpretation
This may sound like a paradox since it would appear that a more complex logo would naturally be more artistic. However, with simpler designs, a logo can experiment with more elements like color and shape and not seem out of place. This is why you may see more variations of simple logos than you did in the past with complex ones.
The best way to see this is to try it yourself. Have you ever done any art projects or graphic design? In fact, sites like Placeit even let you make full designs in seconds, which can really put you in the mind of a graphics designer and business to see why these kinds of logos are the way to go.
6. Synergy Across Products
Companies want their products to reflect their brands, and with a simple logo, this can happen more easily. The less design elements are in a logo, the more a product can incorporate it into their designs.
For example, take Google’s logo, and their 5 main colors. Every product and service Google puts out incorporates those 5 colors in their branding, so you immediately recognize a Google product just at a glance, no matter how obscure it is.
7. Legibility and Accessibility
Not everyone has the same ability to process information at the same rate. Some might take longer to read words or might have trouble seeing. Therefore, the more simple a logo is, the more accessible it is for everyone. Accessibility is a huge consideration now whenever a company designs a product. The more accessible they are the more users will be able to utilize their products and services, and all that starts with a recognizable logo.
8. Marketing
Companies want to put their logos everywhere, and that means the simpler a logo is, the more likely it fits another company’s guidelines. Say for example a business wants their logo advertised in the home page of a tablet whenever a user logs on.
If the logo doesn’t fit the style guidelines of the tablet company, the business might lose that opportunity. A simple logo on the other hand typically can slot itself anywhere.
9. To Let You Use your Imagination
Sometimes, the most interesting images are the ones that let us use our own imaginations to fill in the blanks. One example is an old company logo that used a real person’s face. A user would have never met that person before and wouldn’t identify with it.
However, when the company replaced that logo with a simple smiley face, now the user or viewer can imprint on that logo a lot more and relate to it better, as they could the ones smiling. Letting our minds fill the blanks is something we don’t often think of, but can have a major impact on how we identify with not only logos, but art as a whole
10. To Fit with Evolving Times
One huge reason logos have changed is because the things we view with them have changed.
Previously we would see logos in places like billboards, t-shirts, or store advertisements, which required them to be big and flashy.
Nowadays, technology and society have evolved so we mostly see logos appearing on screens, like our phones. This requires a change in design philosophy as logos have to become more subdued to fit where users will be looking at them the most.
What Makes These Changes Work?
So to summarize, a logo should have its brand, company, and identify all established from just a quick glance. The reason logos are so simple nowadays is because they want to communicate much more to you than ever before, and they do that by making their logo simple and easy to understand.
What might seem boring to us is actually the result of years of iteration and fine tuning