Why'd They Flatten Our Logos?
What is Flat Design?
We’ve all noticed it. The logos for our favorite sports team, snack brand, or defense contractor becoming more and more simplified. I don’t have any figures or percentages to share with you, but this isn’t too hard of a phenomenon to prove. Just Google “____ logo history” and you’ll likely see the following pattern: a logo is created, it is iterated on and tweaked throughout the 20th century, then sometime around the late 00s or early 10s, the logo suddenly becomes radically simplified. Let’s look at this chart from Gatorade for example:
In this example, the consistent brand identity is established in 1970. We can see that it’s made up of a lightning bolt, a rectangle and text with the brand name and the tagline. The primary brand colors are orange and green. From 1970-2009, the logo goes through quite a few phases and alterations. The lightning bolt gains and loses weight, before landing on a sharp, aggressive look. The rectangle becomes a bit rounder and eventually just becomes an expanded white outline for the text. Outlines and highlights are added to the lightning bolt to give it a bold, 3D appearance. Besides those tweaks, the logo retains its basic attributes for 40 years. Then in the late 2000s something very strange happens. Gatorade is introduced to what’s called “Flat Design”
Flat design is easily recognizable by its minimalism, legibility, and inoffensiveness. Like any other design language, it has rules and characteristics. For the purpose of this analysis, let’s lay out these rules so they can be referenced as we look at further examples.
Made up of simple elements and shapes. Logos often fit inside a circle or square
A limited number of colors. The colors are often simple or muted and very rarely use a gradient.
A lack of outlines, shadows, shading, highlights, or any other design flourishes that could create a 3D effect.
No text or if text is included it will use a simple and legible sans-serif font.
With this list in mind, let’s finish our analysis of the new Gatorade logo. The ‘09 variant is a vast departure from what we had seen the previous 40 years. The entire shape of the logo is now changed to a circular “G” shape. This G is black, devoid of any outlines or highlights, and is distinct from any previous Gatorade fonts. The lightning bolt was spared, but has been scaled back in it’s size and design, it is no longer the defining characteristic of the logo. There is no text at all that indicates the name of the brand or any tagline.
Complete brand identity death. Or something close to it. Maybe complete brand identity coma or complete brand identity breast reduction. You may have a few questions here, I’m guessing either “Why is this happening” or possibly “Why should I care”. I’ll get to that.
What’s the Reason for Flat Design?
So, why are companies doing this? How does it help a brand to completely reimagine its logo in a way that reduces decades of iteration and development? I think a lot of the growth in the flat design trend can be traced to two main factors, smartphones/social media and money. Trust me, I understand blaming smartphones for things has become trite, but I think there is a clear connection between the rise in both smartphones and flat design.
Previously, we would primarily interact with logos on billboards, signs, magazines, business cards, TV, etc. These are places where for various reasons, a detailed “3D” logo could be appreciated and easily distinguishable. Now that the primary place we interact with brands and advertising has changed, logos have changed as well. Smartphone displays are small and Instagram profile pictures take up an even smaller fraction of screen real estate. Suddenly, there just isn’t room for a big lightning bolt and a bunch of text. I don’t feel that it’s a coincidence that many companies’ logos started the shift towards flat design in the late 2000s when smartphones and Facebook became ubiquitous. Why have text in your logo when someone is already on the Mastercard page? They know what they’re looking at. Why have intricate shading, outlines, etc? We’re just looking at a few pixels. It doesn’t matter anymore.
Cost figures in when we start to consider small businesses and local companies. Go out to your local cool neighborhood, I’m sure your city has one called “ShoeTown” or something. Walk down the street with the pre-war buildings and keep an eye out for the coffee shop, record store, or artisanal butcher logos. It’s all flat design. Go home and turn on your computer, pick a random type of local business, and find ones that opened in the past 10ish years, you’ll see more flat design. It’s because these logos are cheap, easy, and can often be made by the business owners themselves. I asked a friend of mine who owns a record store where they got their logo. He paid $35 for it on Fiverr years ago and never bothered to change it. Does he particularly like his shop’s logo? No, but he needed a logo for his Instagram and is a phenomenally cheap person.
I imagine this story is similar to a lot of other small business owners. Flat design logos are easy to make and inexpensive. Most local business owners just need a logo for the sake of having one, they can just rely on their store or restaurant to develop their brand and perception.
What’s My Problem with Flat Design?
This is a set of a few NBA logos, the ones on the left are from the late 90’s/early 00’s and the ones on the right are current logos. Much like the Gatorade example, we see some drastic changes. The total number of colors is reduced, the fonts are simplified, additional design elements have been cut, and everything is forced inside a neat circle. The older logos were maximalist, abrasive, in-your-face, and fun. They had character, they forced us to use our imagination. “Why is the Minnesota Timberwolf half light and half dark? Does he represent the conflict between good and evil every Minnesotan is burdened with?” Perhaps. They felt like they represented basketball, dynamic logos for a high-powered and thrilling game. The new logos don’t abide by the same philosophy, their aim is to convey the team name and identity with efficiency and clarity. The problem is, efficiency and clarity aren’t any fun.
This is really where my issue with the pervasiveness of flat design stems from. Does flat design have its uses? Of course. Something like Apple’s iOS or Google’s entire suite of software uses flat design very effectively. The only difference is that those are tools that require a level of directness and utility. Logos are the visual expression of a brand, they’re art, and for most of us Middle Americans, they’re the only art we see every day. Flat Design trivializes that art, it smashes that expression into bits. It spits in the face of a company’s history. It makes beer cans look wimpy, it makes our great menacing intelligence agency look like a SAAS company.
Eventually, I hope we collectively realize what’s been lost. That we start to appreciate things that are fun again. That we stand up and demand that our sports team logos and our bank logos have some differentiation from each other. I don’t know if that’ll happen, I think it’ll take another technological shift away from smartphones and social media and hopefully to some other forum where maximalist design can thrive again. I’ll be here, waiting.
I believe Gatorade changed their logo to better reflect Gus’s Law of Hydration.
In other words, Gatorade is quenching less thirst than it used to.