CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapurple`

I once saw an interview with an apparently well-known logo designer, who said something to the effect of: "When somebody sees my work and says 'that's nothing, anybody could make that', that means they instantly got the logo, understood its structure, with no distraction. That's what it's meant to do, so to me it's a compliment."

Whether that applies here is naturally subjective, but hearing that changed how I look at logo designs a bit.

There’s a limit to that. By that token, every logo in existence could be a white square with black text on it. Clearly they are not, because people understand the need for some differentiation. Even in this case, the logos benefit from having colour.

And they’re not even consistent. Three of them are squares, two of them are different shapes, and despite the simplicity even something as trivial as the font size and spacing isn’t uniform.

I dunno, a lot of professional design these days of extreme flatness looks like stuff I’d have done in the ‘00s while developing something just to have some kind of design and structure, then everyone would see it and be like “the program’s great but of course we’ll need to get the designers on it, ha ha, programmers and design, so bad at it, am I right?”

A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.

> that means they instantly got the logo, understood its structure, with no distraction.

We didn't get that it was supposed to be a logo or a brand though.

Labels like this look like placeholders. They leave you feeling empty and convey a sense of amateurishness.

These do provoke a visceral response. It's not an "Oh!", nor even an "oh?", but rather an "oh..."

The "brand guidelines" will be broadly disrespected since the mental threshold for brand awareness is higher than the entropy of a square.

Eh, having worked halfway between coding and design my whole career, I'm ambivalent. Design is just one of those things that everyone is confident they have an informed opinion about, even if they've spent a lifetime total of zero seconds thinking about what the criteria for a good design should be, let alone how to apply them. I think most every designer learns early on to ignore all the "but that's just..." comments, and rightly so IMHO.

That said:

> A lot of it would still get that reaction, I think, if a programmer presented them instead of a designer, and these look to me like they’d be among them.

Weren't the logos in TFA made and voted on by programmers?

> By that token, every logo in existence could be a white square with black text on it.

As I think you already know, the designer obviously wasn't suggesting that. He was saying that clarity matters, not that only clarity matters.

I could listen to logo designers talk all day long, you pick up some many nuggets of wisdom. I've watched pretty much everything Aaron Draplin has online that you can access for free.