Sometimes, your intact because it is the passive source of a great deal of customer comfort and therefore, loyalty. But the truth is, even the best brands in the world need to change (and have changed) to reflect changing trends. Even those designs that have persisted for decades (maybe even centuries) have only done so in the most abstract sense. Such logos morphed gradually, almost imperceptibly as time went on. The following are a few brief examples of how brands have been successfully redesigned in the past.
Logo designers are regularly criticised by the press when they achieve it at great expense, but the key to reinvigorating some key brands really has been to take designs and simplify them. The logo for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has shown that there’s room for this in even the most simple logos. The BBC logo design is one that trends changed to be complex before it got simple: it started simply as a serifed ‘BBC’. The 60s brought in a sans-serif look for the font. This font was italicized, and by the end of the 60s it was enclosed by rounded, slanted boxes. A late 80s redesign applied more sophisticated coloring to the design, and gave the boxes blue, red and green underlines. But this was a true 80s aesthetic and one unlikely to last beyond the often garish early 90s: the current, non-italicized, sanserif logo has been in use ever since.
The Apple logo is another logo that went through a similar contemporary change. Their design language has steadily come to emphasise the sophistication of their products. But for logos, multicolor is no longer high-technology. Even though colourful themselves, the traditional rainbow stripes of the old Apple logo would have looked terrible on the iMac. Does the move towards simplification make these logos evergreen? This is unlikely. But when a logo is seemingly on its last legs, distilling it down to its base elements may just give it an exponential life boost.
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