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[FK in the Coffee]

[Saker]

Minimalism is taken too seriously these days.

[Fifth]

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?

[Dr. Cooldude]

Minimalism is taken too seriously these days.

This.

[Christian Knudsen]

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

[Manuel Magalhães]

lol

[C.A. Silbereisen]

some wear a eagle is weeping at the travasty thusly committified

thanks i love america keep on rockin in the wee frorld

[AMAZON]

it is more appealing than the old one imo


still shit tho

[AlexHW]

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

[Schoq]

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

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

[Morroque]

... 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 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?

[Schoq]

What was the theory?

[AlexHW]

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.

[ham and brie]

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.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

[Blademasterbobo]

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)

[AlexHW]

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

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.

[Blademasterbobo]

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?

[AlexHW]

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.

[Blademasterbobo]

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

[AlexHW]

Nice sophistication there.