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(http://estaticos.elmundo.es/elmundo/imagenes/2012/08/22/cultura/1345625028_0.jpg)

Minimalism is taken too seriously these days.

A cyan dot?

Maybe they just wanted to trademark it so that they could sue any medium printed in CMYK for repeated unauthorized use of their brand in miniature?

This.

What advertising agency charged them half a million bucks to come up with this dot?

lol

some wear a eagle is weeping at the travasty thusly committified

thanks i love america keep on rockin in the wee frorld

it is more appealing than the old one imo


still shit tho

Is that the globe? probably designed by someone that doesn't know where the U.S. is on a map..

This plus making every inevitable unrelated instance of a cyan dot free marketing.

Same reason people trademark common words like EDGE for their brand...

... I actually have a theory about this. Lately the process of "rebranding" has often involved a signifigant loss in detail. This might be the most obvious with examples like this, as well as other things like the Apple logo (going from a massive wood-dye cutout akin to Gustav Doré, to a mere geometric shape), but you can see the same type of "simplification, bit by bit" in smaller businesses and icons (http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/the-b-side/) as well.

I wonder... Let's say we have a program like, Vector Magic, take all the old and new rebranding choices it can find and compare the two by having the computer recreate the image as if it were an eps or svg. It will then count the number of nodes and count the difference between them. Would there be a negative relationship?

Of course, we'd need some other data to correlate it with. What would that data be? Year in which the redesign took place? Net profits during the time of rebranding? Size of the company?

What was the theory?

There could be two reasons for this pattern..
1. Design standards regarding what makes a good design and these get emphasized and considered best practices for people learning how to design things.. Basically cutting out any need for artistic interpretation.
2. Society is losing their sense of sophistication. You can see it in all media- things today are bolder/more primitive looking than stuff 30-50 years ago. Today there is overuse-age of very saturated colors/contrast/etc where-as in the past there were more softer tones that gave a sense of refinement/sensitivity to the subtler aspects of life as well as more intricate work that require more time and thought. Today there is less thought put into stuff as everyone tries to squeeze out profit and in the process sacrifice quality.

Part of the brief was probably to have something that scaled well to small sizes, for things like the mobile site and favicon.

Personally I don't have a problem with minimalism being taken seriously.

you're a fucking moron if you think there aren't plenty of examples of that from 50 years ago, eg the 50s film industry (plus or minus 20 years)

Tell him to take it all away then because by that definition, doing nothing would make you the best designer. It would also help reduce the crap and allow people who actually want to design to be able to design interesting things that have some sort of meaning.

here's another example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_pop

music was just as mindless, film was super exploitative... maybe you were just high through all those years, or maybe you only see the good stuff from then because you're too stupid to realize that critics have heavily filtered what remained as "classics" once those years passed by?

Everything comes in cycles, and society at large seems pretty unrefined lately. You can see it clearly in the way things are made now in relation to past creations and these levels vary over time. Yes, there are some things that are more refined today, and we should be looking at those things and learning from them(including things from the past) rather than becoming dumbed down because we're afraid to spend the time to think for ourselves.

yeah you're pretty much just outright wrong, and just saying 'unrefined' in a sentence doesn't really prove anything

Nice sophistication there.

Naturally a theory is nothing without exact evidence to back it up, but my intuition is that it might have something to do with the very process of "rebranding" itself, or that this form of simplification might happen when the scale of the group it represents becomes so large that any form of expressive individuality becomes impossible.

Historical examples of things with the simplest logos would be things like the red cross and the christian crucifix - large, international organizations that had simple and homogenized representations, at least when compared to slightly more complex nations with more detailed flags, and even more to specific kingdoms with highly ornate coats of arms.

Since the idea of "branding", not in the product name sense but in the business conglomerate sense, has root in early forms of globalization/internationality, the very practice of it is to reduce the complexity of an organization's appearance, all the while the actual complexity of the organization's structure increases.

So my theory is that, barring historical circumstances, as the size and complexity of an organization increases, the more bland and homogenized their outward appeal becomes.

... of course, since this is a claim about media homogenization, this theory is somewhat hard to actually prove.

A design needs to fulfil its purpose. The point of the quote is that a designer ought to be clear about what they're trying to achieve with the design and has the discipline to remove anything that isn't justified in serving that purpose.

That makes sense, Morroque. It's kind of disheartening to think that the more you include everyone, the less of an identity all those people will have. I mean.. A cyan dot? what does that say about that organization? It's like they stand for nothing as their characteristics blend together and become diluted away. What will we have left if all this continues? How will we understand who we are if we can't tell one person from another?

As nice as that theory is, all these companies redesigning their logos into a much more simplistic form isn't doing so because they've just now reached some critically complex size. It's just the current style or fashion. It's just modern or hip or whatever to have clean surfaces and a simplistic logo. In 30 years, all these logos might be redesigned into an overly complex and elaborate form as a counter-reaction to the current style. And not because the size and complexity of the companies have decreased, no, merely because styles and fashions change with time.

"What does that say about that organization?"

Actually, it says the opposite of what you think it does, as unintuitive as that sounds.

Take note: the new logo outright mentions what the holding company of the newspaper is: The Gannett Company (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gannett_Company).

Take a look at their assets:


Horrifying, isn't it? USA Today is merely but one node of an entirely synergized network, all of which sharing key personnel and resources within the parent company's pipelines.

In the end, it forms a media system that is so inwardly complex and difficult to put together from an outside prespective, that the most outwardly noticable nodes in the network (such as USA Today) literally have no choice other than to put on the façade of simplicity. Otherwise? They'd frighten away their customer base for fear that Big Brother is real and is keeping tabs on them.

If my theory has basis, you might apply this sort of thinking to any type of high-complexity business environment. Especially to the zombie banks with the single-type, sans-serif typography logos. Were they too big to fail, or perhaps too complex to be properly understood what effect they were actually having? They hid such complexity very well from their partons, with their sans-serif logo typography and effective brand management -- at least until things went wrong.

It's not like these companies stand for nothing. In fact, they stand for everything. They extend their reach in many ways - much more than we can understand. And it's because of this that they hide how much they stand for, by merely appearing so simple.

Really, not many of us truely want to have to deal with a heartless, uncontrollable, and utterly massive corporation, or an overtowering and unmovable bureaucracy. It's simply not pleasant. This type of highly neutral branding isn't mere fashion -- it has some utility. It makes it seem unassuming. It feigns innocence to what it externalizes.

But maybe Mr. Knudsen is right, and there is so fashion in it after all. Any conglomerate that is truly heartless can't hide that fact forever. Maybe there will be a time when this type of homogenized blandness in visual identity will merely reflect exactly what it tries to hide, and a revolution will be sparked anew. ... but how long will it be, before these massive structures consume the revolt and make that the new evil? A cyclical history doesn't solve problems -- it merely prolongs their effects.

that's pretty scary.


I guess that would be the intent, but wouldn't one question the complexity and think why? In my opinion such complexity gives the impression that they don't care, but that they just want power.
So I just look at it and think that they don't stand for anything because they are so invested in everything not to really think about those involved but rather simply the involvement itself. That's pretty messed up!

Yeah, so if the purpose of the new logo is to hide the complexity of the business structure USA Today is part of, it's doing a really shitty job, wouldn't you say?

;)

Big organisms move and think rather slowly. That, and corporate brainstorming is considered a contemporary continuation of dadaist surrealism these days; so your assertion that this look at things from their viewpoint doesn't follow a complete logic would indeed be entirely correct. Believe me, I don't hold corporate branders in terribly high regard. I recently made the mistake of reading some literature from the more professional brand managers and found their language to be quite noxious and borderline with Vogon poetry. Those experts who recommended this logo dumbdown know so much about one thing that the rest of the universe of discourse is simply unknown to them.

I'm sure they'll realize it's not working sooner or later. 'till then, think of yourself as the game hero and think of dealing with this as guiding a somewhat stupid escort mission AI around where if it makes one false move it'll make the world explode. It's just some crazy thing we're all forced to put up with - a groupthink we all hate but will still happen anyway.

This idea I have about inverse relationship between the working complexity of the structure against the visual complexity of their media image is still just theory. I'll welcome anyone who thinks of a reason why it might not be correct. I'm not exactly in love with this topic.

Aha, so you have not figured out the brilliance of this logo yet? That is not just an cyan dot. The logo cleverly brings up the global warming issue in a sublime way. This logo represents the water levels of the earth if we do not slow down this process. USA Today are not just being minimalist, they are realists.

(http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/usa_today_05_LogoBehaviors.jpg)

Looks boring on its own, but the other versions look decent.

forget usa today, lets talk about usa tomorrow and attend barack obama speeches

@ev149: With those logo variations, it makes a lot more sense. It kinda reminds me of how DC does their logo and variations.

north korea would never have such a pitiful logo, you fucking american.

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