New Era of Logos - is Less More?

I am by no means brand expert but lately, I have been wondering whether there is an ongoing trend for company logos with some parts of the alphabets missing? I couldn’t help noticing that one day there were three posts almost in a row in my LinkedIn feed, and they all contained the company logo – what was common for the three logos was that in all of them the name of the company was “broken”, namely the alphabets were written only partially. You probably know at least one of those logos that I am referring to, and I hesitate to mention the others since this post is just an objective attempt to write about this phenomenon. Co-incidentally, all these three logos are of companies headquartered in Finland.

I’ve patented lot of inventions related to coding and compression, and these inventions have been related mainly to lossless coding, where the decoded output data is equal to the encoded input data. However, it is also possible to deploy lossy coding, where some of the data is, as the name of the method suggests, lost in the process of encoding and decoding. The latter is what seems to have happened to these logos, too – the company names were inputted to an imaginary logo generator, and the output is less than what was fed in.

Lossy coding is feasible in some cases when the size of the file is desired to be reduced – for example, for streaming companies it would be beneficial if they could use less bandwidth for transmitting video streams from one continent to another. However, the compression usually comes with a trade-off, and the image quality will also degrade. It is a choice whether the streaming companies want efficiency at the cost of watching experience. If the movie can still be watched with sufficient quality, it may be feasible to compress the video. Does the same apply to these logos – if name is still readable, you can save space?

Lossy compression algorithms reduce the file size by discarding the less important information. What on earth could be such information that can be lost, e.g. in streaming movies or music? Well, lossy algorithms are all about figuring out clever ways to remove some details without humans noticing it. You can still watch the whole movie – nothing has been taken out of the manuscript. Similarly, you can still listen to your favourite music despite of some audio having being discarded, as the sounds selected for removal are outside our hearing capacity.

With regard to these new type of logos, the choice has been made to remove parts of the company name, even if the removal is definitely visible to human eye. This has probably been justified because the brand is already so familiar to everyone, that they can still figure out the company name from the new logo, despite of being written in a bit cryptic manner. But what is the main business reason in this change? Efficiency? Should the company logos still be painted to the big arenas and office buildings, then this kind of logos with less alphabet surface would surely save paint, at least in big plagues. But is it more efficient in digital world, too? Or perhaps the logos are meant to be referring to digital age of the companies, as opposed to the earlier type of logos used in the traditional world? In fact, all the logos I mentioned are digital companies, i.e. specialized in digital development and said to accelerate the global digital transformation.

What do you think of this new trend (if any) as a consumer or a brand owner? Is Less more or less? Or, is Less perhaps the new Black?