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.