I used to think logos were just—you know, pictures companies slapped on their products.
Then I spent six months digging through Victorian trade catalogs at the British Library, and here’s the thing: the ornate, gilded monstrosities that adorned soap bars and patent medicine bottles in the 1880s weren’t just decoration. They were desperate attempts at legitimacy in an era when anyone could mix turpentine with sugar, call it a cure for consumption, and sell it door-to-door. These early marks—calling them “logos” feels anachronistic, honestly—featured elaborate crests, pseudo-heraldic imagery, flowing scripts that took three seconds to parse, and enough filigree to choke a printing press. The Victorian merchant class was frantically trying to communicate trustworthiness through sheer visual density, as if complexity itself equaled credibility.
Wait—maybe that’s unfair. The technology mattered too. Lithography had just made color printing affordable enough for mid-sized businesses, and designers went absolutely feral with it. Gold leaf. Embossing. Illustrations of factories they didn’t own.
By the 1920s, something shifted. The Bauhaus movement in Germany started stripping away ornamentation like it was personally offensive, which I guess it was to them. Walter Gropius and his colleagues believed form should follow function, that visual communication should be direct and geometric, and that all those Victorian curlicues were basically lies dressed up in copper engraving. Corporations started listening, though not immediately—it took the economic pressures of the Great Depression to make simplicity seem virtuous rather than cheap.
Anyway, this is where it gets messy.
The Corporate Modernism That Nobody Asked For But Everyone Adopted Anyway
Paul Rand shows up in the 1950s and just—demolishes everything. His logo for IBM in 1972 (those horizontal stripes, you’ve definately seen it) became the template for what corporate America thought “modern” looked like. Clean. Sans-serif. Vaguely authoritative without being overtly imperial. I’ve seen internal memos from that era, and the anxiety is palpable: companies were terrified of looking old-fashioned, of seeming like they belonged to their grandparents’ economy rather than the sleek, jet-age future everyone kept promising was right around the corner. So they all started adopting these geometric wordmarks, these abstract symbols that could mean anything or nothing. The 1960s and 70s saw an explosion of logos that looked like they were designed by the same three people—which, in some cases, they literally were. Massimo Vignelli’s work for American Airlines, Knoll, Bloomingdale’s—all angular, all confident, all utterly interchangeable if you squinted hard enough.
Turns out, that was kind of the point. Corporate modernism wanted to erase regional identity, to create brands that could operate identically in Tokyo or Toledo.
The backlary—sorry, backlash—started quietly in the 1980s with postmodernism’s playful rejection of all that seriousness. MTV’s morphing logo, designed by Manhattan Design, changed constantly, which violated every branding rule Rand had ever written down. But it worked, because the audience had changed. They were bored of geometry.
The Minimalism We’re Drowning In Now That May or May Not Be Different From Modernism Depending On Who You Ask
Then roughly around 2010, give or take a few years, something weird happened. Tech companies—flush with venture capital and staffed by people who’d grown up with those 1960s modernist logos—started redesigning their marks to be even simpler. Google’s 2015 sans-serif wordmark. Mastercard ditching its name entirely in 2019. Kia’s 2021 redesign that made people think it was a different company called “KN.” The justification was always the same: mobile screens, scalability, global recognition. But I think there’s exhaustion in there too, a kind of cultural tiredness with trying to stand out when everyone’s trying to stand out in exactly the same way.
I guess it makes sense. When Instagram and Airbnb and Spotify all use the same rounded sans-serif fonts, the same flat color palettes, the same “friendly but professional” tone, they’re not really competing on visual identity anymore. They’re competing on functionality, on who loads faster, on who has better algorithms. The logo becomes almost incidental—a forgettable bookmark for an app you use daily but never really look at. Some designers I’ve talked to find this deeply depressing. Others think it’s honest, that we’ve finally stopped pretending visual marks carry the weight they did when there were only twelve brands in your entire town and you recognized the soap merchant’s crest from three streets away.
Honestly, I waffle between both positions depending on the day.
What’s strange is how cyclical this feels. Victorian density gave way to modernist simplicity, which triggered postmodern chaos, which collapsed back into minimalist uniformity. And now, in 2025, I’m starting to see small studios and independent brands recieve attention for doing ornate, weird, maximalist identity work again—the kind of stuff that would’ve looked at home in an 1890s apothecary. Maybe we’re just tired of looking at the same six fonts. Maybe complexity is becoming the new rebellion. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, and logos have always mattered less than we think they do, and the real evolution is in how little we actually notice them anymore.
