No words for how perfect this article is and I thank you for putting words to my horror as an artist living in san francisco. Zuckerberg even commissioned blobular cartoon statues outside our hospital.
I think the flat design is a subconscious protest against the particular and bespoke. The essence of the folkish is that "what makes us different is more important than what makes us the same". It's our rough edges, our flaws, our irregularities, our particularities that make us who we are as peoples. When we think of a Texan we think of the ten-gallon hat, the big belt buckle, and the spurs. When we think of the Arab we think of the red and white keffiyeh, the beard, and the sandals. We don't think of two arms, two legs, and a solid colour shirt.
Liberalism strives to flatten out human difference to shoehorn particular peoples into an abstraction called "human". It is a fundamentally childlike way of viewing the world, a world of safe spaces, of high neoteny and low sexual dimorphism, where everyone is heard, and everyone gets a turn at the bat. Kindergarten, basically. No wonder its aesthetic belongs in a daycare.
Fabulous observations on a topic that is near and dear to me as a former graphic designer and someone who still enjoys creating digital art. It pains me that there are so many artistic and unique fonts in the world, and yet, corporations seem to only want to use two or three of them. It seems to jibe with a general trend of limited choice that we see in many avenues of life, especially consumer choices. Cars, for example, once came in a wide array of paint colors; visit a dealership now, however, and you will see a sea of white, gray and black vehicles. Other colors are available, but they are rare and often need to be custom ordered. You find the same theme in stores that sell furniture, home goods or wall art: all is beige, gray, black, or white. It is as if the world has been desaturated, all life and vitality drained away, all sense of vibrancy and culture gone.
And I have to add that I have begun to despise the cartoonish "people of flat design". They no longer even possess facial features, which I think says a lot about the creators. Even small children, when drawing people, will add eyes, nose and a mouth! But our current marketing culture doesn't share the same observations of humanity. And of course, without facial features, it would be impossible to evaluate the emotional condition of the people of flat design, wouldn't it? Who would know if they are happy or sad with their conditions? Removing facial features from them is the equivalent of putting a bag over their heads. It's saying, "I don't care how you feel. Your happiness - or lack of it - doesn't concern me."
The issue boils down to what's easiest for those that manage our society. Treating people as individuals is hard, treating communities or organizations as individual is also hard. They boil it down to what the managerial class understands best: checkmarks on the employment form. The underlying psychology of neoliberalism is to redefine every one solely by either physical traits or what consumer brands they purchase. The destruction of the culture and art native to a civilization is not an unfortunate side-effect, it's an intended end. Destruction of the individual in the name of individualism. For as long as we're operating under the purview of a managerial system, these behaviors will only continue to self-reinforce... partially as resentment from the useless Woke drones against those who are actually economically productive. I think that the psychological/spiritual trauma the West is going through is more extreme than any one is giving it credit for... Wrote an article recently that is related to this issue. https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/post-faustian-ethnos-identity-and
Would really appreciate it if you read it, Woes, or especially if you restacked it for me. Thanks!
To summarize the above it is much easier to sell things if you can grind everyone down into the same grey paste. Thus you only have one consumer group which is easy to know the wants and desires of.
Managerialism/Internationalism takes this to government institutions and the people they govern. “Wouldn’t ruling be so much easier and the better if everyone was interchangable Cogs? Think of the efficiency!”
Doing this to a people renders them less than human.
Good analysis of the logos, and a very boring/suspect trend. I was a designer for some years (before moving into another field). What I was starting to notice wasn't merely the flat people, but the weird multi-colored people: like, purple, green and blue people, as a strange stand-in for race, without the need to specifically depict any particular race -- rather just a flag for "we care about race" i.e. diversity. And it made everything look cartoonish and garish, on top of being flat and without detail. Like you, I appreciate good modern layout and typography (oh, for some nice horizontal rules separating things!) but there's something else going on here -- and good design isn't it.
This reminds me of a Zero Hedge article I read about 'activist journalism'. TL;DR: the commie professors started pushing this in Journalism School, and now it's common fare (instead of just being a journo who give the '5 Ws' and let's people make up their minds).
I wonder what affect the teachers in the big design schools have on this, and where did they get the idea from?
Maybe increasingly generic logos have something to do with Blackrock and Vanguard taking ownership of nearly every major corporation on the planet? Why would corporate emperors retain the distinctive identity of a purchased business, once it has been merged into the global conglomerate?
Regarding the 2-dimensional DEI cartoon people, (Diversity Equity & Inclusion being one of the UN's 17 Sustainability Goals) a one world government, as per the United Nations, has to appeal to every strata of society across the globe if it is going to pretend to be taking care of everyone. After all, one of their ominous mottos is: "Leave no-one behind".
Don't forget NFL and NCAA Colleges getting their logos downgraded. Supposedly it was for manufacturing ease, so their Chinerkid workers could print ever smaller logos on cell phone dongles clearly.
Great article and something I too have been observing over recent years. The area that I find particularly egregious is county and civic emblems. We have a rich history of heraldry full of meaning and symbolism but today we create 'logos' instead make everything look corporate and banal with no reach into history.
These corporations spend a fortune on all this re-branding which goes to show how much importance they attach to it. The bbc logo has been endlessly fiddled with - it doesn't quite fit into your model as it was always very minimalist - though they did succeed in switching it from an italic font to something even more generic and characterless. The Anglia Television logo is a better example of quirky/unique to non-entity - funnily enough I can even recall a marketing magazine interview with the brand consultant who did it boasting about how he set out to subvert the brief given him - "we need to keep the knight" whereby his designs went "the knight-a knight-no knight"
This I think is the nearest description of the culprit: Corporate rebranding to keep up with the joneses, and I'll throw in another element without any evidence just a hunch, monopoly and/or consolidation in the graphic design market.
Dollars to doughnuts, there's just a hivemind among C-suiters that they need to look hip, whatever the trends are, their logo has to look like that. Alongside them, major advertising firms are buying each other up (again, NO clue if this is really happening, but since it's happening in every other sector including *cheerleading, from uniforms to competition arrangements,* I wouldn't be surprised), there's a real good chance it's because all these corporations are asking the same 10 individuals on the planet what their logos should look like. For other examples of monopoly effects, see Matt Stoller's BIG Substack, https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
I think company logos usually reflect their stage in development, you've got the early creative experimental energy of start-ups, the attention grabbing but confident reliabity as they climb in stocks and shares, then to the 'sophisticated' mature big corp phase, they've found their place, while still focused on growth, the logos now aim for comfortable familiarity and normalisation, they aim to be unobtrusive, part of the everyday social fabric (this is probably the ultimate sweet spot for a company). Also the corporate suits have to justify their importance. You can't quite pull off the Bateman business card scene with Ronald McDonald grinning back at you.
Also you could map Spengler's cyclical theory of civilizations onto the evolution of the Yahoo! logo. What a decline.
Forgot to add .. in the late sophisticated stage,some companies experience an existential crisis, where they start championing batshit social experiments, almost as if they're searching for meaning. I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's more accurate to say that they go through a period of bloat, where the 'inmates try to run the asylum.' These companies are often too large to collapse outright, leading to a prolonged period of dysfunction or what some might call a 'clown show.'
Sorry for bumbling on, another excellent article once again 👍👍
In the online realm, you will also note that websites all look alike. I made this observation in particular when browsing on various SaaS brands, that are very much online-only. Competitors all look alike, and if you were to remove the logo from the website, you could not guess which company it is.
I think a lot of it also has to do with the obsession on „optimization“. People get conditioned to certain UX elements, and what happens is an endless cycle of copy&paste and AB-Testing, forcing the entirety of the web to that one „scientifically proven“ optimum.
Combined with the widespread absence of true creativity and willingness to step out of line among the web caste, this also leads to the flattening you describe. I am not sure as to whether this is really deliberate, or the unintended, but unavoidable, consequence of streamlining globhomo lemmings in marketing departments
Very good observations! I too have noticed this, and it ties into a larger trend of uglification, commodification, and pursuit of the lowest common denominator. Everything that makes us interesting and human must be effaced; all must be quantified and reduced to simple formulas. Ultimately it's a reflection of Managerial Liberalism and its hegemonic worldview. Just as historic regimes & empires had their trademark aesthetics & styles rooted in deeper values, so do we. But in our case, those values are cheap and interchangeable.
yes its typical Woes - I think you could call his writing "observational tragedy" as opposed to the comedy version for which the current era offers less and less scope.
This is an excellent article about something I'd never given much thought to before. While reading I was reminded of something I saw on Woes' twitter page a while back. A lemming made the facile point that red jelly beans added to a jar of green jelly beans does not constitute 'replacement' of the green jelly beans. When you bear in mind that these people see humans as historyless, cultureless, kinless jelly beans, the 'people of flat design' aesthetic begins to make sense.
No words for how perfect this article is and I thank you for putting words to my horror as an artist living in san francisco. Zuckerberg even commissioned blobular cartoon statues outside our hospital.
I think the flat design is a subconscious protest against the particular and bespoke. The essence of the folkish is that "what makes us different is more important than what makes us the same". It's our rough edges, our flaws, our irregularities, our particularities that make us who we are as peoples. When we think of a Texan we think of the ten-gallon hat, the big belt buckle, and the spurs. When we think of the Arab we think of the red and white keffiyeh, the beard, and the sandals. We don't think of two arms, two legs, and a solid colour shirt.
Liberalism strives to flatten out human difference to shoehorn particular peoples into an abstraction called "human". It is a fundamentally childlike way of viewing the world, a world of safe spaces, of high neoteny and low sexual dimorphism, where everyone is heard, and everyone gets a turn at the bat. Kindergarten, basically. No wonder its aesthetic belongs in a daycare.
Fabulous observations on a topic that is near and dear to me as a former graphic designer and someone who still enjoys creating digital art. It pains me that there are so many artistic and unique fonts in the world, and yet, corporations seem to only want to use two or three of them. It seems to jibe with a general trend of limited choice that we see in many avenues of life, especially consumer choices. Cars, for example, once came in a wide array of paint colors; visit a dealership now, however, and you will see a sea of white, gray and black vehicles. Other colors are available, but they are rare and often need to be custom ordered. You find the same theme in stores that sell furniture, home goods or wall art: all is beige, gray, black, or white. It is as if the world has been desaturated, all life and vitality drained away, all sense of vibrancy and culture gone.
And I have to add that I have begun to despise the cartoonish "people of flat design". They no longer even possess facial features, which I think says a lot about the creators. Even small children, when drawing people, will add eyes, nose and a mouth! But our current marketing culture doesn't share the same observations of humanity. And of course, without facial features, it would be impossible to evaluate the emotional condition of the people of flat design, wouldn't it? Who would know if they are happy or sad with their conditions? Removing facial features from them is the equivalent of putting a bag over their heads. It's saying, "I don't care how you feel. Your happiness - or lack of it - doesn't concern me."
You should read my indictment of colour grading. It is another aspect of the aesthetic dumbing-down you describe.
https://arnoldtohtfan.substack.com/p/colour-grading-as-sensory-deprivation
"The ease of creation was the excuse. But was it the actual reason? Again, I don’t think so."
I doubt it too, considering the budgets of places like Google and Microsoft that push this look.
The issue boils down to what's easiest for those that manage our society. Treating people as individuals is hard, treating communities or organizations as individual is also hard. They boil it down to what the managerial class understands best: checkmarks on the employment form. The underlying psychology of neoliberalism is to redefine every one solely by either physical traits or what consumer brands they purchase. The destruction of the culture and art native to a civilization is not an unfortunate side-effect, it's an intended end. Destruction of the individual in the name of individualism. For as long as we're operating under the purview of a managerial system, these behaviors will only continue to self-reinforce... partially as resentment from the useless Woke drones against those who are actually economically productive. I think that the psychological/spiritual trauma the West is going through is more extreme than any one is giving it credit for... Wrote an article recently that is related to this issue. https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/post-faustian-ethnos-identity-and
Would really appreciate it if you read it, Woes, or especially if you restacked it for me. Thanks!
To summarize the above it is much easier to sell things if you can grind everyone down into the same grey paste. Thus you only have one consumer group which is easy to know the wants and desires of.
Managerialism/Internationalism takes this to government institutions and the people they govern. “Wouldn’t ruling be so much easier and the better if everyone was interchangable Cogs? Think of the efficiency!”
Doing this to a people renders them less than human.
... it also creates a catastrophic demographic decline.
It's basically a death cult
Good analysis of the logos, and a very boring/suspect trend. I was a designer for some years (before moving into another field). What I was starting to notice wasn't merely the flat people, but the weird multi-colored people: like, purple, green and blue people, as a strange stand-in for race, without the need to specifically depict any particular race -- rather just a flag for "we care about race" i.e. diversity. And it made everything look cartoonish and garish, on top of being flat and without detail. Like you, I appreciate good modern layout and typography (oh, for some nice horizontal rules separating things!) but there's something else going on here -- and good design isn't it.
This reminds me of a Zero Hedge article I read about 'activist journalism'. TL;DR: the commie professors started pushing this in Journalism School, and now it's common fare (instead of just being a journo who give the '5 Ws' and let's people make up their minds).
I wonder what affect the teachers in the big design schools have on this, and where did they get the idea from?
Maybe increasingly generic logos have something to do with Blackrock and Vanguard taking ownership of nearly every major corporation on the planet? Why would corporate emperors retain the distinctive identity of a purchased business, once it has been merged into the global conglomerate?
Regarding the 2-dimensional DEI cartoon people, (Diversity Equity & Inclusion being one of the UN's 17 Sustainability Goals) a one world government, as per the United Nations, has to appeal to every strata of society across the globe if it is going to pretend to be taking care of everyone. After all, one of their ominous mottos is: "Leave no-one behind".
Don't forget NFL and NCAA Colleges getting their logos downgraded. Supposedly it was for manufacturing ease, so their Chinerkid workers could print ever smaller logos on cell phone dongles clearly.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DIWbkS7t-MI/maxresdefault.jpg
Great article and something I too have been observing over recent years. The area that I find particularly egregious is county and civic emblems. We have a rich history of heraldry full of meaning and symbolism but today we create 'logos' instead make everything look corporate and banal with no reach into history.
These corporations spend a fortune on all this re-branding which goes to show how much importance they attach to it. The bbc logo has been endlessly fiddled with - it doesn't quite fit into your model as it was always very minimalist - though they did succeed in switching it from an italic font to something even more generic and characterless. The Anglia Television logo is a better example of quirky/unique to non-entity - funnily enough I can even recall a marketing magazine interview with the brand consultant who did it boasting about how he set out to subvert the brief given him - "we need to keep the knight" whereby his designs went "the knight-a knight-no knight"
This I think is the nearest description of the culprit: Corporate rebranding to keep up with the joneses, and I'll throw in another element without any evidence just a hunch, monopoly and/or consolidation in the graphic design market.
Dollars to doughnuts, there's just a hivemind among C-suiters that they need to look hip, whatever the trends are, their logo has to look like that. Alongside them, major advertising firms are buying each other up (again, NO clue if this is really happening, but since it's happening in every other sector including *cheerleading, from uniforms to competition arrangements,* I wouldn't be surprised), there's a real good chance it's because all these corporations are asking the same 10 individuals on the planet what their logos should look like. For other examples of monopoly effects, see Matt Stoller's BIG Substack, https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
I think company logos usually reflect their stage in development, you've got the early creative experimental energy of start-ups, the attention grabbing but confident reliabity as they climb in stocks and shares, then to the 'sophisticated' mature big corp phase, they've found their place, while still focused on growth, the logos now aim for comfortable familiarity and normalisation, they aim to be unobtrusive, part of the everyday social fabric (this is probably the ultimate sweet spot for a company). Also the corporate suits have to justify their importance. You can't quite pull off the Bateman business card scene with Ronald McDonald grinning back at you.
Also you could map Spengler's cyclical theory of civilizations onto the evolution of the Yahoo! logo. What a decline.
Forgot to add .. in the late sophisticated stage,some companies experience an existential crisis, where they start championing batshit social experiments, almost as if they're searching for meaning. I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's more accurate to say that they go through a period of bloat, where the 'inmates try to run the asylum.' These companies are often too large to collapse outright, leading to a prolonged period of dysfunction or what some might call a 'clown show.'
Sorry for bumbling on, another excellent article once again 👍👍
Very interesting thoughts!
In the online realm, you will also note that websites all look alike. I made this observation in particular when browsing on various SaaS brands, that are very much online-only. Competitors all look alike, and if you were to remove the logo from the website, you could not guess which company it is.
I think a lot of it also has to do with the obsession on „optimization“. People get conditioned to certain UX elements, and what happens is an endless cycle of copy&paste and AB-Testing, forcing the entirety of the web to that one „scientifically proven“ optimum.
Combined with the widespread absence of true creativity and willingness to step out of line among the web caste, this also leads to the flattening you describe. I am not sure as to whether this is really deliberate, or the unintended, but unavoidable, consequence of streamlining globhomo lemmings in marketing departments
Very good observations! I too have noticed this, and it ties into a larger trend of uglification, commodification, and pursuit of the lowest common denominator. Everything that makes us interesting and human must be effaced; all must be quantified and reduced to simple formulas. Ultimately it's a reflection of Managerial Liberalism and its hegemonic worldview. Just as historic regimes & empires had their trademark aesthetics & styles rooted in deeper values, so do we. But in our case, those values are cheap and interchangeable.
yes its typical Woes - I think you could call his writing "observational tragedy" as opposed to the comedy version for which the current era offers less and less scope.
This is an excellent article about something I'd never given much thought to before. While reading I was reminded of something I saw on Woes' twitter page a while back. A lemming made the facile point that red jelly beans added to a jar of green jelly beans does not constitute 'replacement' of the green jelly beans. When you bear in mind that these people see humans as historyless, cultureless, kinless jelly beans, the 'people of flat design' aesthetic begins to make sense.