How sans serif marks this era as surely as Tekton marked the early 1990s (SWWC vol 4, issue 12 )
Hello!
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I have never felt so flattered as I did when a former beau tracked me down on Facebook just to send the message, "I read Pattern Recognition and Cayce Pollard reminded me of you." He was, I think, referring to my swotty teenaged insistence on being conspicuously anti-brand name, but it's sweet to have my adolescent reactivity parlayed into this:
What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.
Mine was an approach based in part on my parents' clear-eyed approach to consumer culture: "Is Jordache paying you to display their logo? What? No? Then why would you pay more for a piece of clothing and give them free advertising?"
As I got older, I broadened that approach from clothing to other consumer goods. I am a compulsive snipper of tags, peeler of labels and decanter of goods. When a brand starts paying my mortgage, then I'll tolerate its product label in my visual space.
That sort of behavior is, as William Gibson noted, a sort of branding move unto itself. And the truth is, you can't avoid branding. Some things are distinguishable by their very design: there's a reason the Tumblr F*** Your Noguchi Coffee Table exists. Even the things I choose to contain my decanted products send their own branding message: OXO pop-top containers come from a company that's built a brand on the idea of that its customers care about attractive and thoughtful product design. And, it is thus implied, the customers have sufficient cultural capital to know what constitutes good design and optimal function for any household good. Such flattery for a product I use to store chocolate chips!
Hostility to product labels aside, I am fascinated by how companies design and extend their visual branding. So I was thrilled to see a spate of articles examining how brand logos are changing. Rob Walker (formerly of Moneybox on Slate, now writing for Bloomberg) tackled the topic on November 20, writing:
Bill Gardner, a designer who obsessively tracks corporate identities at LogoLounge, cites a litany of pricey brands that lately have opted for the all-caps sans-serif look: Céline, Rimowa, Diane von Furstenberg, Balenciaga, and Saint Laurent, as well as Saville’s own refresh of Calvin Klein in 2017. All have been transformed into crisp-angled letterforms.
The overall trend is hard to miss: Luxury isn’t connoted with fussy extras; no-nonsense boldness is the rule. “Spartan solutions have been rampant in all areas of design,” Gardner says.
Shortly after the article was published, old-school luxury brand Balmain debuted a new sans-serif logo. It's an interesting data point when considered in context to something Anne Quito wrote in Quartz in March this past year:
Type designer Jonathan Hoefler says the reign of sans serif fonts can be explained by the traditional notion that sans serifs connote progress and modernity while serifs evoke nostalgia. “[This] is why for 60 years the sans serif has been the standard costume of industries like aerospace, information systems, medicine, and biotech,” argues Hoefler, whose type foundry designed (by former business partner Tobias Frere-Jones) and licenses Gotham, one of the most popular and over-used sans serifs of late.
Interesting, because the brands listed above are luxury brands that rely on some sort of nostalgic resonance to maintain cachet yet they're all going with clean sans serif. And people are beginning to get opinions about all the designers hunting serifs to extinction. In a Fast Company piece this past Monday, Thierry Brunfaut despairing of the sans-serif-and-space trend, calling it "blanding." He writes:
Some of today’s most established brands have erased their identity and, in one turquoise swoop, neutered their brand. Take Peter Saville’s controversial redesign of Burberry’s wordmark. The radical use of a neutral type eliminated all decorative elements. In Burberry’s case, these details weren’t superfluous; they happened to evoke style and class and heritage and something nobody else had—something that was, for lack of a better word, Burberry. Celine, too, went minimal recently, killing its accent and adjusting the spacing of its wordmark to “enable a simplified and more balanced proportion” that is designed to read as well on Instagram as it does on the side of a building. Blanding, the suggestion seems to be, is just good business.
Blanding may well be one of the most accurate reflections of our current culture -- because it's all about reducing noise and letting the consumer project whatever they want into the space that's been freed up. Last year in Racked, Eliza Brooke provided a litany of VC-backed (read: tech darling) lifestyle brands that went with a sans-serif visual identity: Outdoor Voices, Bonobos, Frank And Oak, Lyst, AYR, Reformation, Glossier, Allbirds, and Thinx. (I'd also add VC-backed ventures Cuyana and Rothy's.)
Very nearly all those brands promise streamlined consumer experiences and authentic quality products. These will, presumably, elevate the quality of your life and your self (premises played out in some hilarious stunt-writing by Rebecca Jennings this week). They will not, presumably, bring in any messy historic or cultural baggage to mar the simple, authentic experience of separating yourself from your money.
It will be interesting to see when simplicity is no longer regarded as a luxury.
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Your pop-culture recommendation: I've written about my Scandinavian reading binge before but I really must insist that you try Nordicana: 100 Icons of Nordic Cool & Scandi Style by Kajsa Kinsella. It's an excellent visual primer on what traits make something seem Nordic-designed (as opposed to, say, Swiss or Japanese) and since design is such a product differentiator at every level of American commerce, it's nice to learn about this stuff in a book that's perfect for picking up and putting down whenever you have ten minutes here and there.
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