Over at Be a Design Group, Paul Berkbigler complains about the stripping down of graphic impact in logos. He points out a before and after tale between a heyday of corporate design and the watered down, overly rendered style of today. His example is UPS, but I think that changes in Coke and Sprite designs from the 1960s to now would show the same thing.
Oddly enough, Paul quotes favorably a Tom Wolfe quote that seems to disagree with his point somewhat, but perhaps the agreement is mere skepticism about corporate vanity:
they often seem like so much designer window dressing and can fetch some staggering prices when produced by big agencies. More often than not, those big agency marks also seem to be the variety that Wolfe’s Pratt student would laugh out of a critique in a heartbeat.
Having temped in the marketing department in a nameless big corporation in town, I can say that the diagnosis is true at least some of the time: marketing departments and VPs can put a premium on vanity projects over graphic design principles and actual persuasion of consumers.
Or maybe corporations are being rational, and consumers aren’t especially persuaded by high graphic impact. At the very least it seems a historical change in design taste has occured all around.
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