Unpleasant Minimalism

or, "The Generic"

It is often said that culture stopped evolving shortly after the year 2000, and since then we have just been swirling around in stasis. I have come to think that this is over-stated, in a way, but I will address that elsewhere.

There is one thing that certainly has changed since 2000. There has been a steady drift towards what I would call “the Generic”. This goes for almost everything, but the particular manifestation that I will talk about here is that graphic design has become simpler and simpler. The change is very clear from looking at how brand logos have evolved since 2000:

Seen all at once, the same trend across so many different brands, it is truly striking. The process of simplification causes, in its wake, homogenisation, so that a very diverse range of fonts has become much narrower. At this point, the brands are both nondescript and indistinguishable from each other. Quirkiness, flavour and individuality are gone.

I have noticed this before but it came back to me this evening during some nostalgic googling about the Body Shop, a place I was familiar with as a child because my mother was a loyal customer. During my research I inevitably caught sight of its current logo, and that reminded me of this notion of a drive towards the generic. Here is the evolution of the Body Shop’s logo:

Quirky and bohemian in the original, then reassuring and earthy in the 1990s with a nice nourishing hue, but then in 2004 the Generic has suddenly arrived. With a slight rotation of the colour wheel away from yellow and towards blue, the warmth is gone.

The font has become sans serif. It is not quite generic (yet), but it is uninteresting, and hard to distinguish from every other corporate brand.

Also, from now onwards, the graphical part of the logo is simpler. This emblem, originally two symmetrical halves, is now only one. There are subsequent changes but the halves never return.

The three whisps have been reduced to two (eventually reverting to three, in 2020). Most subtly but perhaps most importantly, in the 2020 version, the whisps are shorter than ever before. This makes the graphic less interesting, reduces the sense of flow and motion, and eliminates the sense of a protective gesture that had been there from the beginning.

In addition, with the change in 2017 and again in 2020, the font becomes even simpler and blander than in 2004. The 2017 version represents the arrival of the Generic, the font being completely indistinguishable from that of every other brand. The 2020 version brings, for the first time, all the text onto one single line; easier for the eye but less soothing for the brain.

From 2004 onwards, the text becomes an ever greater part of the logo, the emblem ever smaller. The logo becomes more of a label than an evocative, “story-telling” image. I wouldn’t be surprised if a future revision eliminates the emblem entirely.

The logo for the Yahoo web company:

They obviously started out thinking “quirky” and tried various things in their first two years before settling on the famous red 1996 version. They stuck with that for thirteen years but then, in 2009, it just had to be simplified, somehow. The colour was made less intrusive and the grey shadow removed. But still the font was too distinctive, too iconic and unusual, so in 2013 it was swapped for a generic one. But it wasn’t generic enough, so an update was made six years later. This update also switched the text from all upper case to all lower case, which is baby-ish.

The logo for the Firefox web browser:

From a distinctive and enjoyable logo (2004), we eventually get to a version that is uninvolving, uninteresting, and really, not even discernible as the form it is supposed to represent. The globe has been replaced with a nondescript purple circle, and we are left with the two elements of the name: a fox, and fire. Sure, they have preserved that… but without the cool water of the globe, the image has only warm elements; there is no relief, no balance.

And what is the fox now doing, without the globe to react against? Up until 2009 there is a clear “story” to the image, a relationship between the two things. From 2009 onwards this relationship is steadily obliterated: first the landmass is made fainter, then in 2017 gone completely, and in 2019 even the ocean is no longer blue. Moreover, in 2019 the fox is no longer looking at the world; the world is no longer there.

In addition, there is the general loss of texture. There was never much of this to begin with; the 2005-09 version was, by traditional standards, a very simple image. But subsequent changes made it more and more simple so that the 2019 version is more a symbol than a logo. It could almost be printed in greyscale, or even a stark black outline.

All of this is even more ridiculous when we consider that we have better image display capability than ever before. There is no technical advantage conferred by simpler images. Also in the production of imagery, we have a million ways to create texture - we are choosing not to. It is a fashion, a fad, or perhaps a commercial imperative, or, more dark still, something suggested to us by the state of our culture.

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This trend also manifests in how we depict human beings in graphic design.

The “people of flat design” aesthetic (also called Corporate Memphis and Alegria) was already widespread before COVID. (Here is a thread complaining about it in 2019.) However, the scourge reached its apex during the pandemic, and by the end of that era far more people had been sickened by it than by COVID-19. The style utterly dominated digital imagery during that time, even motion imagery.

The excuse was a pragmatic one: such imagery was very easy to make. Any graphic designer familiar with Adobe Illustrator could easily depict a person, if the standard was this low. You didn’t need artistic skill; you could just whip together some lines on the screen and call it a person, and nobody would fire you for it because minimalism, even of the grotesque kind, was now en vogue. (You could also defend it on the basis that it is ideal for vector drawing, which is ideal for reproducing at any scale - but is that really such a concern? I doubt it.)

The ease of creation was the excuse. But was it the actual reason? Again, I don’t think so. After all, it doesn’t explain why the standard was that low. And, indeed, ease of creation had never been a sufficient reason before. Or is it the case that we have really just become this lazy, even at the professional level?

I won’t dismiss that possibility. Yes, it is possible that the POFD aesthetic became ubiquitous for merely prosaic reasons, and there was nothing sinister or significant about it.

But, given the drive towards minimalism in other aspects of graphic design, one would be foolish to assume that POFD took off for entirely different reasons. Clearly, there is a general drive towards minimalism, and it’s only natural that this would include how we represent people.

I also think there might be something sinister going on specifically in the depicting of humans. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It seems significant that POFD emerged in the age of identity politics; those traits we are now told are overwhelmingly important - skin colour, disability, gender identity, etc. - are easily emphasised in this way of depicting people. They are not merely present “emphatically”, they utterly dominate the person, who has no distinguishing features, traits, personality, except these ones. The person is not “a person”, but “a generic Muslim” or “a generic ginger White male” or “a generic differently-abled Asian woman” or “a generic quirky Black woman”, etc. In this case, we are in a society that so abhors depth and sincerity that it instead offers us generic “things” we can be, and has given up offering us anything more substantial or true; the person, once free to buy consumer products but understood to be subject to a deeper realm than that, has been transformed into a consumer product himself, and thus denied any deeper realm.

All of that aside, this way of representing people seems inherently trite, shallow and disrespectful. It is as if we are being trained into a new (and very degraded) way of regarding people, as a species. Why this would be done is, of course, a very important question.

Alternatively, this method of depicting people might simply be a natural manifestation of the increasingly impersonal and detached nature of modern society, and the resulting fear of contact, of intimacy, of meaning, of understanding. As we humans come to fear “humans”, we become more comfortable with very bland and sterile depictions of “humans”. Needless to say, if this is what is going on, it is extremely unhealthy.

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The irony is, I am actually a great fan of simplicity and minimalism. I love the idea - I get a real thrill from it - of something being done as economically as possible, minimal resources in the input and minimal frills in the output.

I do believe that simplicity is a virtue. Everything in life - every product, service, design, piece of text, storyline, creative work - should be as simple as possible. The issue is in the word “possible”. The word “appropriate” would be better. It is always technically possible to make something simpler, but at a certain point it ceases being appropriate. Thereafter, to continue simplifying is an act of vandalism and degradation. Where that point is will differ from case to case, but I think we can safely declare that it has been passed in the case of all the brand logos pictured earlier. Even if we happen to prefer one of the later versions, was the change appropriate? Even if we enjoy the simplicity here or there, what does it do to us, to our culture, to our society, to the people around us?

But of more concern is the “people of flat design” phenomenon, because it seems to me to have not just cultural implications for society, but psychological implications for every one of us. And so I wonder if the genericising of fonts and logos was really just a necessary forerunner of that, a step on the way to genericising us.