It’s the shitty contagion of Flat design. Back around 10 years ago or so, the Flat craze began and everything that had details or depth was pounded down into simple flat design. Now everything has to look basic and boring, and it sucks.
This doesn’t have anything to do with flat design. It’s the fact that people take hammers and look at everything as a nail and go pounding things. Everything like this is a “contagion”, people just latch onto hot button ideas and go crazy. Flat design in itself is fine, and extremely beneficial for what it was designed for, it’s just overused because people chase trends.
Before flat it was skeumorphism and that was even worse. You had everything in tech trying to look like real things which made things way too busy and hard to read. And then people tried to make it work on tiny phones with low res displays and it was difficult to use.
Hence, flat design was born as a solution. It made icons easy to read on tiny devices. And it did a good job at that. It solved a problem and did it well and everything was well and good.
The problem was the next step where people decided they needed “consistent branding” so they did it on their website too. And then their marketing materials. And then their products. Then you had a problem.
Flat design works well for what it was made for: iconography. And for legibility of small UI. But it’s not for everything. But people can’t think for themselves and solve different problems in different ways. And Google made it easily available everywhere. And people picked that up and use it everywhere. And THAT is the problem.
I think flat design makes sense for logos too, for the exact same reason it makes sense for icons. Flat logos are easier to recognize and see, especially from far away.
I’m not saying this logo great or anything but I don’t think it’s fair to claim that everyone using flat design is just a trend chaser.
I never claimed they were all trend chasers - my point was that it had a good place and then trend chasers over did it, and those areas are problematic. There is a place for it where I think it deserves to stay, but people have used it in the wrong places and overdone it in others to the point where the overuse had started showing issues.
I’d argue that designers don’t even understand why they use Flat design in ui’s. The purpose, as you said, is to reduce clutter. However designers don’t understand this and remove all context from all UI elements. What is interactive and what is static is no longer discernable.
I’m writing this in Thunder and nothing in Thunder’s UI shows any distinction between text that is interactive and text that is only text. You have to click the screen at random to see what happens.
Because of this, I’d argue that Skewmorphism is better because we have had 10 years of bad UI showing that designers do not know how to apply Flat design principles.
Skewmorphism is like garbage collection for programmers. A programming language doesn’t need it and is faster without it but too many programmers for too long have shown they can’t be trusted to write clean code.
I’d agree with everything you say about designers choosing to use flat designs without understanding the point. It’s definitely overdone and this becomes a problem.
But your argument for skeuomorphism is a huge stretch. We had ten years of skeuomorphism also showing it just straight doesn’t work in a lot of places. It becomes overloaded and hard to read.
But you’re comparing it to absolute off the deep end applications of the opposite. Why not somewhere in the middle? The entire argument you make for it is just that “well people understood what was click able etc” which is literally just basic design principles and nothing to do with skeuomorphism uniquely.
Why can’t we just expect UX people to do their jobs correctly? Why throw the baby out with the bath water in order to get a different baby we know has other issues?
We had ten years of skeuomorphism also showing it just straight doesn’t work in a lot of places.
We had 30 years of skeuomorphism starting with the Mac in 1984 and it always worked although suboptimal. Flat can be better but when not done right it’s worse than skeu. I personally would rather have a UI that is more cluttered but always discoverable over a UI that isn’t always obvious.
We can’t expect UX people to do their jobs in the same way we can’t expect programmers to do their job correctly.
I really like the simplicity of flat design. It makes things easier to find and recognize, especially for icons. Also easier for people with poor eyesight. It caught on for a reason.
Lemmy loves to shit on designers but there’s no way the designer had the autonomy to come up with this on their own. 100% guaranteed this idea came from marketing or an executive.
I don’t like flat design because it’s basic, boring, and sad. Windows 10 and 8 were ugly flat boring UIs for example. IMO peak GUI design was Mac OS X 10.6 like this:
Windows XP’s Fisher-Price design and OG iPhone lickable buttons were an excess we should have learned from instead of dumping altogether. It’s like music software started getting skins that were as non-rectangular as possible, and the whole industry went no, that’s silly, let’s stop.
Now you look at Windows 10 and it’s not even clear which parts of a window are connected. Windows friggin’ 95 had drop-shadows and relief shading. Why do modern OSs need to look like a Kraftwerk album?
Even within that idiom, it sucks. His face is clearly-expressed through one dark blob - but it’s not a good face, or even a good expression. His jacket was opened for contrast… when it was already lined down the middle, for contrast. The line no longer conveys a barrel-chested manly man.
His hand gripping the pommel like a cane is a sign this was either nitpicked to death or done badly on purpose as a cry for help.
Art Institute really fucked us there. They taught “color by numbers”. Instead of teaching students how to make unique creations, they constantly hammered in “well this is what the corporate world wants right now”. What was “good” was creatively devoid and could be made by following a checklist. Had an ex who changed their entire art style, persona, and had business cards made up of some hexagon style because “hexagons are all the rage right now!”. Business card looked like something a beekeeper would hand you, not a graphic designer.
I’m so confused by the reaction to my comment. Do people think I said this rum was for successful business men? Or what I actually said that they see themselves that way.
I understand what you’re saying. I think you can interpret what you said in two ways that sound like you don’t know captain morgan: either you think actual successful businessmen drink it or you think people who aren’t successful but ignorantly think of themselves as successful drink it.
I think you’re getting downvotes because both of those groups wouldn’t drink captain morgan as a “sign of their success”
A man would really have to closely associate his individual identity and sense of security with brand marketing and politics to feel emasculated by a brand changing its logo. Or 10 brands or 100 brands or all brands. That would be a really pitiful excuse for a manly man. It’s like self-emasculation.
But did they have to make him pose like a misanthropic and unsatisfied middle manager who has been forced to have a souvenir photo taken at some local “pirate island” park in order to try and prove that deep down they’re fun in the company newsletter that no-one reads?
It’s not like Mr. Corporation said “Cleatus! reduce the colors needed to print this sticker! That’s what’s going to make us a profit for this quarter!” Instead, Cleatus and his logo team are incentivized to cut as much cost as they can because they get a bonus every quarter based on how much money they save the company. So someone on his team whose expertise is in label manufacturing for the company pointed out that they could save a fraction of a penny per sticker by reducing the amount and variety of ink it takes to produce the sticker.
That and/or someone in advertising has decided that now, statistically, is a good time to rebrand, and what I said above in combination with the current trend of minimalism means that this new logo fits all the criteria while saving money.
Generally it’s not much savings if any to do more than 1 spot color instead of full process cmyk. It might even be more expensive since it’s a new setup for the printer. Given the volumes they’re printing at it’s probably basically a wash.
I heard somewhere before that often these simplistic logo changes are due to how they look on thumbnails, mobile devices etc. Unsure of the evidence there but it made sense to me. I still hate it though.
Ok I’m in a waiting room super bored so forgive my ridiculous takes, but the second one is probably a better logo even if the design is worse in a bunch of ways.
So, first lets look at Morgan as a brand. It’s a known brand, but not exactly top shelf stuff. From what I can find, they seem to be trying to change that, moving into the ready-to-drink and doing a bunch of social media stuff. they’ve moved from using artificial vanilla flavor to real Madagascar vanilla which is definitely more marketable no matter if it actually tastes better or not.
So as part of that they’ve redesigned basically all their labels and that means they need vibe with the modern upmarket design trends which right now are to use more type and negative space, and to ape design from the era around the 50s and maybe 60s. It goes with the current retro packaging design trend but doesn’t alienate older people like the 70s based stuff, which is usually aimed at a younger market segment. It’s old enough to feel “classy” even if the customer is old.
As part of that, the large illustration doesn’t fit. Printing full color like that in the era it’s aping was expensive so it feels out of place, and you just don’t have space for it if you want a clean look. So it’s got to be way smaller. The old label has the illustration as basically the main focal point - it’s huge. The new one has it as a small design point. The illustration just doesn’t work at that size. On a little 50ml bottle it’s going to be like 4mm high. Here’s a photo I found.
The new one actually reads pretty similar even though it’s like half as tall and only uses 2 colors. When it’s on a bottle that small and sitting next to Admiral Nelson and Lady Bligh which still use big full color illustratons on their labels can you tell which one is which?
But here’s the thing, the captain isn’t even actually the logo. The logo is the name, it’s the same logotype. They didn’t change that. They changed the mascot. It’s pretty important to note that there’s a big difference. A logo basically is your branding. It needs to work at any size, in any medium, and be instantly recognizable. That generally means it needs to be pretty simple. The Morgan logotype works great as a logo, but the mascot until now really didn’t. You can tell because if you look around there are about 50 different versions because the big full color illustration doesn’t work more often than it does. The new one will.
With all that defense I will say there are a few kind of dumb moves. The treasure chest is clearly a terrible idea. Like, if they were swapping it in on the non-alcoholic lines it would be kind of great but on everything it’s dumb. And I definitely would have fought for a puffy shirt instead of the collared one, if nothing else than for historical accuracy - I don’t think you can even wear shirts if the era unbuttoned with a collar like that. Edit- honestly they might be going intentionally anachronistic so that you can “cosplay” as the captain easily. Do the pose, hard cut to the captain logo, it writes itself. Which would be kind of clever but if that were the case I might have pushed the whole thing to be slightly more androgynous.
Anyway, I keep seeing this take over and over again, that everything is moving to minimalist blobs for logos, and while sometimes there’s definitely a point (the cross branding for Google’s apps on Android come to mind) a lot of the time there done just like this - with two large copies next to each other. And when you frame it like that of course the detailed one will look better. But when your logo has to shrink to 32x32px on a crappy Android phone or be printed like 5mm wide in black and white the simpler one is going to look way better.
Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.
Tldr: the guy isn’t the logo he’s the mascot and the new one can be printed small.
Fewer colors also makes it easier to reproduce in mediums where there’s a per-color expense, like shirts, embroidery, etc and works better when converted to greyscale. Keeping the same look across all merchandise is good.
This is all true. But he still looks like David Arquette instead of Dustin Hoffman’s Hook. They could have retained his swagger even with a simplified look.
I wonder if people are getting that impression since it’s a normal 7 or 8 heads tall now instead of 9 which is what the old one looks like. Making it closer to a normal human would make sense if there’s aiming for cosplay / self-insert type marketing. The more I think about it the more im willing to bet that’s the angle.
It’s only better as a logo because it’s a vector image and can be printed on everything. It’s worse in every other way, and they could have vectorized the original Captain without making him a narrow shouldered dweeb.
They’ve been editing him a lot too, comparing your bottle with the OP photo they removed half his cape and slimmed up his legs… for whatever reason they’re trying to reduce complexity and bulk overall. Maybe make him less “larger than life” and associated “toxic masculinity / XTREME” 90s-00s imagery going back to what, ya know, actual wrestlers and pirates and stuff would’ve looked like (minus the business collar)
If you look at the people in advertisements, you see the demographic that the company is targeting to buy their product. If you think that’s what the new captain looks like, maybe it will be a successful change for the company, even if the loud voices on the internet don’t like it.
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