What Is Behind The Recent Trend Of Debranding

What Is Behind The Recent Trend Of Debranding

In recent years, some of the world's biggest companies have discarded depth and detail to D brand. Burger King lost weight. Rolling Stone found a cleaner edge. VW shared its depth and shadow, as did Kia Pfizer, Nissan, Durex, Intel, Toyota, and a host of other major brands. Even the munchable hero Julius Pringle had a flattening makeunder with shaved head dive moustache, dilated eyes, and new presprung eyebrows.

But what prompted this landslide of logo debranding? Several interlocking forces are at work, the most immediate of which is the pressure of mobile first, design clients used to ask, can you make the logo bigger? Now the trick is to shrink an entire identity into a tiny digital box. Such pixel pressure usually means returning to the 2D look of old.

Of course, this 2D look was more or less the norm until computers took over and design inflation spiraled out of control. Anyone who has overfiltered an instagram sunset knows the seductive lure of visual excess, and it's a seduction to which the pros are not immune. The ability to round corners, drop shadows, customize gradients, and create complex lighting effects can easily overpower the creative brief and often does.

Many recent debrands represent a return to sobriety after a spasm of software abetted intoxication. There is also the question of maturity. Many of our biggest brands were born in a spirit of playful innocence that burst forth from their early branding take Foursquare, Airbnb, GoDaddy, Google. As these companies grew and the stakes rose, so their logos were obliged to mature from cartoonish to corporate, flamboyant to flat, wacky to bland, illustrating the power of de branding to professionalise.

And then there is fashion. Company graphics are as susceptible to trends as any other design, as we see in the stampede of fashion's little black dress logos heralded by Is Saint Laurent in 2012 and followed by Diane von Furtenberg, Calvin Klein, Beluti, Burberry, and Balmain. Yet the most intriguing element of the debranded logo is its potential to become a portal.

Warner Bros. Didn't just strip back its theatrical golden guilt. It unlocked a world of possibility that's increasingly vital to brands that span genres, showcase variety, or offer 31 flavours. For all these reasons, it seems likely that debranding will be with us for a while. But who knows when the pendulum will swing and the trend reverts to detail, complexity and personality?

After all, once a critical mass is zagged against a prevailing zig, the margin becomes mainstream, the template flips, and the dance begins afresh.