# Are all brand designs starting to look alike? Channel: Flux Academy Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOgniIawux4 Duration: 13 min Language: English Words: 2035 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/vOgniIawux4 --- [0:00] Are too many brands starting to look alike? That's what we're going to talk about today. Let's go! [0:09] Hello, designer friends! Welcome back to Flux where we talk design business and everything in between. My name is Matt Brunton and today we're asking the question: Are too many brands starting to look alike? We're going to look at two features of this, firstly trends and then what's been known as blanding. Now, trends are something that as humans we want to latch on to. We want to categorize things, the unknown is too scary and we struggle to describe things if we can't compare it to something else. You ask your friend about something and they'll probably start off "well it's a bit like..." and they'll compare it to something [0:47] known. As soon as we start seeing things with similarities we want to pull them together as trends, particularly people creating content and news, that it's something to talk about but you can definitely identify looking back over a greater period certain trends that emerge and they often arise for noble reasons. A lot of people trying to solve the same problem may entirely independently arrive at a similar solution but obviously once a few of these [1:18] projects are let out of the gate then you get the copycats that follow and the trends quickly date. Something like Gumroad who released their brand identity, and we covered it here on Flux in 2021, are using this trend where you've got heavy set like heavyweight typography often in all caps but you've got this sort of strange word mark here where they've got a mix of cases. And the Sans Serif fonts digital black and white often yellow and pink in this style alongside a real ensemble a real color palette of a lot of different colors in there a lot of different clashing bright colors and often this illustration style this black outlines on their [2:06] grid and around the illustrations and these flat style stick stickers like where it says exciting here weird characters and this sort of offbeat sort of vibe. When you're following a trend for something like a corporate identity you really run into the risk of it dating of it looking old hat very quickly and I wonder how long Gumroad are going to be able to stick with this style and how quickly elements of it will be jettisoned. There's something like the Sydney Film Festival which also is for 2021 but this is a festival an event for that year so this is an identity for this year alone and we see a lot of the similar features. Black and white although the kind of off black [2:52] and off-white here but they're all caps bold weight headlines we have the black outlines around illustration we have yellow and pink featuring prominently along also different this time but greens and blues and reds and just that whole loud clashing color style as well as the flat stickers and the illustrations that are kind of rudimentary and it's kind of like an offbeat vibe to it. We saw a lot of those sorts of projects but I think with something like Sydney Film Festival you can get away with it because it feels for the year for the moment and that's okay because the following year the identity will be refreshed for that year's festival. So, trends are timely [3:39] but for other brands who are wanting something more timeless they've been accused of what's known as blanding and that's where a brand is created or rebranded and it just feels non-descript it feels boring and so it's bland and there's not much to recommend it there's not much to distinguish it think of tech companies all painting themselves in blue or they have those lowercase word marks with a little squiggly symbol next to it for their combination marks and they all kind of look like the same sort of thing. Another famous example of blanding would be with fashion houses so when Burberry changed their word mark and also Ives Saint-Laurent became [4:25] Saint Laurent... And then my french was struggling a little bit there. They simplified by going from these more complex forms that lasted for a long time and go into this uppercase bold Sans-serif look, I mean if we were going to create a logo for a fashion house now you know how long would that take us, you know? Let's say it's going to be a fashion house so let's call that Fouse. That I'm going to copyright that. That's quite good actually. Well, we would want this to be in [5:00] all caps right? And we would want it to be bold. Oh maybe increase the tracking a little bit. Done. That will be $250.000, please. And it's that attitude is the way these things have been been judged perhaps uh by journalists but in the press maybe in the public consciousness. Don't read the Twitter comments, you know? That was sort of the reaction. Now, one reason for this [5:27] simplification that as designers will be aware of is the proliferation of digital platforms. These brands have been along around before digital when it was just appearing on the products themselves or in print advertisement and in an out of house outdoor advertising. Whereas now having to fit them on small spaces and lots of different digital scenarios and devices their complexity can be can be difficult. Now, there's other ways around that other than just simplifying or you don't have to have this certain type setting but that's, that's a reason and that's a valid reason that's sometimes not uh appreciated when people just judge these logos but also if we [6:13] let's maybe look at the Instagram accounts of these brands because if we went to their website the layouts and things would be very different but here we have a standard layout. Looking at the Instagram grid of Burberry if we look at the avatar we see the word mark setting all caps in a heavy weight and we go to Saint Laurent and again the word mark is set in a similar fashion although this time it's white and black instead of black and white but they're just using black and white and it's very similar and that was similar to something like Chanel's word mark which has been around for a long time. Now, on chanel's Instagram they actually use their [6:50] monogram as the avatar but their word might you can see here is prominent within the grid but what is immediately apparent is that between these things there's a very different aesthetic I think and I'm pretty judging this obviously with my knowledge but Burberry feels a lot more british to me there's tailoring influence there's a lot of layers here and that kind of thing and i'll be careful commenting too much on fashion which is not something i know about as much as graphics but when we come to like Saint Laurent and Chanel for example in these campaigns they're both using the white or caps bold word mark set across the center of these images but they look very [7:33] different because Chanel has this very chic very classic look to it it's got heritage it's a little bit softer to to my eyes. Whereas with Saint Laurent this campaign here this black and white campaign and the bit below it's kind of rock and roll they've even got somebody on stage here with a microphone they've got Jerry Hall who was married to Mick Jagger, I believe, and so they've got a real look to it that is a bit more rock and roll and edge and that kind of attitude whereas chanel is a lot more chic and demure. This is an important point that within fashion you have campaigns so things are seasonal and that doesn't mean [8:20] Saint Laurent won't do other things or Chanel won't diverge either. There are wider characteristics about their brand but also there needs to be room each season for a different campaign. If their logo type was too complex then it would crowd out these elements and it wouldn't lend itself to different scenarios and also the clothes are the hero that is the story the fashion so they already have something visual which is very powerful and very beautiful [8:51] and they want to show off the photography of the clothing and that can't be crowded out. Simplicity is a good choice often if you're designing identity for a fashion house or for something like an art gallery or a photographer so where there's visual elements there you want to let them shine through and not crowd them out or clash with them by having a design style which is incongruous. There's a lot of reasons for these things that people are not always aware of when they're criticizing and they're bringing these comments about blanding. Often it's because they're fixated on logo types and this is lazy journalism when the [9:35] BBC recently revealed their new logos, another thing we covered on our Flux brand review, they got a lot of criticism for it but the biggest story was that they were redesigning the user interface of their online streaming service and that didn't really get any press maybe not a sexiest story as changing the logos but because the changes to logos were quite minimal something they needed to preserve continuity that they built up in this well-established brand that was the thing that the press fixated on that oh all this time all this money not much has changed. We need to when we discussing blanding sometimes it may be bland but are we just talking about a logotype [10:21] or are we considering the entire identity design are we are we realizing that sometimes the art direction of a photography style is going to shine through or some really unique illustrations or it just carries more of a tone of voice and it's very copy led or there's a color palette which is really striking. These other elements can can bring life to a brand the motion the sound all different elements that can light up an identity design beyond just a logotype. I think it's easy to categorize and criticize oh look at this trend or that trend look at everybody doing this and pull it apart it's much harder to create something which is simple enough to be flexible [11:13] but also distinctive enough to identify the company but that's our challenge that's our job as designers and I think we shouldn't be too sensitive about uh criticism that we may receive particularly like in the in the wider press who love to pan identity designers but I think we need to take some responsibility and just say let's educate our clients and any audience that we have about the function of identity design that it's there to identify and differentiate but we're also providing materials visual elements that can bring some consistency to all of a brand's communications and even that consistency is an important thing to help build credibility and at [11:59] the same time let's take responsibility to try and inject as much life and as much personality through our creative thinking into every project that we work on bringing in some visual interest and moments that delight the viewer because having some more fun and some more personality and color and life and interest is part of our our job to to make things look better but also to engage people and to help our client achieve their goals and solve the problems that they're facing hope this has been helpful for you let us know if it has i'd love to continue this the discussion about blanding down in the comments at flux we want to help you because [12:46] we're asking these same questions ourselves about how we square these circles so check out our programs link in the description and make sure you subscribe because there's going to be more of this kind of content soon so until next time happy designing [13:18] you --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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