Additionally it isn't well composed. I learned graphics design from a guy who actually learned it by using his hands to pit down the letters. He had us move one black square around on a white page for 3 hours and explain why we put it where we did. Then we were allowed two squares of arbitrary size, later colors etc.
If you are learning it from that basic level you cannot unsee badly unbalanced design. You cannot just remove a black background with a white one and keep everything unchanged (which is why dark themes sometimes suck as they don't get the extra love they need.
This thing looks like it has been made by the CEOs daugther in Powerpoint.
Used to. These days, not so much. And they're misfiring quite a bit. For example, the new X3 xDrive30e gets a measly 18 miles of electric range (EPA; real-world likely less). All of that added complexity and weight for very little benefit (in 2020 -- 10 years ago it would have been alright). No 3er manuals in the US anymore. Have you seen the rear of the new 3er which looks like Lexus IS? Have you seen what the 5er looks like, heck even in M5 guise? And so on, and so on.
Sry, I used to be a BMW guy and that touched (touches?) a nerve. They had the right formula when the i3 originally came out, and then someone at the top decided to effectively kill the program and most of their top EV engineers left. They would have been way ahead of where they are today, and of most of their competition, had they not intentionally shot themselves in the foot.
With that logo, it's a done deal, I'll never buy their product again. BMW was something you could identify with.
Fake shadows and fake light is not good craftsmanship. It makes sense for a logo on a flat piece of paper to look flat and look beveled and shadowed on a badge.
This evolution of the logo is bad, but not because it's flat.
That's the thing. BMW is recognized as building cars, or as you say _real machines_.
Instead BMW tries to transform its business to provide mobility. Its a service provider and the service is mobility. It is not the cars. The cars are the vehicle to provide mobility, one form of mobility.
BMW has several brands to communicate this mobility, which are ShareNOW, FreeNOW, and ReachNOW. ShareNow is what used to be DriveNow, which is the free floating carsharing. FreeNOW is the Uber-like Taxi-App. ReachNow is the Google/Apple Maps which includes public transport, Carsharing, Taxi, eScooter Rental, Bike Rental so that you can reach your desired destination the most efficient way.
Even in apps you could argue if flat design is the best way to go.
Since Google maps changed their icon I have a hard time finding it instantly between the dozen other flat app logos on my screen.
> BMW builds _cars_, not Apps. They pride themselves in craftsmanship
Do they? You're commenting on a thread about their logo change which suggests they don't.
BMW has for very long time been primarily a brand. Take away the brand and they simply wouldn't compete in the market. They build real machines, but not very good ones. Look at Honda if you want an example of a company that is about the machines.
> Sure, it looks nice on BMW’s bronze-hued electric i4 sedan concept, but what about on a white BMW? Or a letterhead? Or on a sign for a BMW dealership on a highway?
Is the author really concerned that BMW's design team didn't think about how this logo would be used in such fundamental ways? I can guarantee you that they did.
You can personally like or not like it, fine. But if you're going to write a judgey article about it, at least take some basic steps to try to understand why the choices were made. Companies don't just have some intern change their logo up for no reason at all.
Basic steps such as? There is not much available about it.
Also, you think too highly of corporations. Companies literally have an intern change their logo for no reason, i’ve been that intern. There are dozens of levels of people more worried about saving face than anything else.
Butthurt much aren't you? It takes a quick look at the logos compared to see that it looks like shit, no contrast. You just do not see it. I was sceptical about the headline as well but if you just have to lie to yourself the go ahead.
I'm no designer.. but the new logo looks horrendous. From the few design principles I do know, it appears they took all of them and did the exact opposite. If they wanted to stick with flat design, they could have easily repurposed their existing logo without beveling/lighting to achieve what would likely be a much better result.
An awful lot of flat logos and interfaces these days look like things that would have gotten you a "oh, did you, the design-challenged developer, design this? That's OK for now but we'll get a real designer on it before it goes to production" a decade or two ago. Stuff I'd be embarrassed to show anyone because they look like crap (but are within my limited design abilities!) but I guess they're fine because a "designer" did it.
OTOH it's the easiest it's been since the late 90s to make a webpage or program look "professionally designed" if you don't mind the current terrible aesthetic, so there's that.
According to BMW[1], it looks like this is only designed for brand communication.
I wouldn't expect to see this pushed to non-concept cars, at least not for a long time.
The new logo looks more top heavy somehow. When there was a dark ring the logo looked balanced, now it looks like the center of gravity is off and the logo wouldn’t stay upright if placed on a table.
My take on this is the airplane propellers in the center--that's what the white and blue signifies, for those who don't know--draw your eye toward the center-point of the logo, but the "BMW" draws your eye back up, causing a sort of "oscillation." If they insist on this design then eliminating the outer ring would likely cause a more balanced reaction.
It's occurred to me for some time now that design has suffered from globalization in that while surely there is some good in the more rapid exchange of ideas, there has also been this hyper convergence in design where it all just kind of looks the same. Consider that in this particular domain, automobiles, you used to be able to clearly delineate design along national lines. There was a clear distinction in Italian design vs American, German, British, Swedish etc. But now?
The thing that bothers me the most about this minimalist trend is how pervasive it is. I quite like minimalism myself, but I feel like 40 years ago even within minimalism you would have expected to see some difference in execution across the globe.
Which brings me to how trendy the design field is in general. I don't think I've seen a field so uniformly go from one trend to the other and then defend it with such dogged bullshit. Who in God's name is fooled by the poetry? You're using the same design language and aesthetic as everyone else, the only thing creative is the nonsense you're writing to defend it. Why is a field full of 'creatives' so uniform in thought and expression? How many trends have we witnessed so far in web/graphic design? We've built all these powerful creative tools just so they can end up all making logos that look exactly the fucking same. Surely machine learning models can create a good percentage of the design we see today.
What the hell... Yeah its flat but that's obviously not the problem, why would you eliminate the color black from your very famous blue black and white logo.
I don't understand why people spend a bajillion dollars on a logo re-do. My first company did it and it was generic, shitty, and did us no good (Electric Imp). We had a wonderful little imp, we called him the imp dude or similar:
Captured the brand, such as it was, perfectly. A small hacker company started by a man that had hacking coded into his DNA. The founder had started out phreaking at somewhere around age 8. He made a cool bit of money as a teen by custom-programming firmware for lasertag guns and upgrading guns around his hometown. The company was started because he was annoyed at how hard it was to simply get an IFFT style IOT light set up in his bathroom, securely. And so the logo: a cocky little imp creature, imo agendered, with a plug pitchfork and a goofy (optional, not always displayed) tail. Our costume-crazed QA guy even threw together a cardboard and paper-mache version of it for a halloween party once. Possible, because it was a character. It could be anthropomorphized. It represented the company identity.
Then we paid, I don't even know how much, but it didn't matter in the end anyway, for this:
It was supposed to be simple, I guess, and the little line was supposed to represent I guess a single connection on a silicone board? But what is that? What does it mean, what does it represent? How can we form an identity around that, how could it have represented us? We got rid of Imp Dude for no reason. Stupid.
Usually I think these "modern design" complaints are whiny, but man that new BMW logo looks so flat and lifeless. It needs something to make it pop. Also the lack of outline and white lettering seem a hassle to use on anything.
I always thought the Red Hat breakdown of what/why changes of their logo was really well done:
This has absolutely nothing to do with "flat" design. BMW historically had a flat shaded logo [1]. The current logo is just supposed to be the flat shaded badge that goes on the cars, but rendered as if it's actually being lit.
The problem is just that they removed the black ring that is key to the logo and the brand. Add that back, and it's virtually identical to the logo they had for whole second half of the 20th century.
The removal of the black ring is unequivocally not a consequence of flat design.
From a utilitarian maintenance perspective, I think the open design of it makes it such a pain to keep looking good on a car. All those interior edges inside the logo catch debris and are difficult to clean to the edge of the design elements. I prefer car logos with closed smooth badges.
The author has a point, but they seem to have missed the fact that BMW already announced that they won't be using it on cars (well, probably other cars than the concept car featured in the article). It is only for marketing material:
> The new logo is a new media branding and will be used in addition to the existing logo. It won’t be use (sic) on the vehicles or in the exterior and interior labeling our dealerships, the existing logo remains in use there.
Putting the "BMW" lettering on whatever color happens to be behind it creates a strenge dependency that didn't exist before. I'd say that part of the criticism is valid. But the rest of the logo adheres to BMW logo heritage, as the article admits. "Flattening" the central part of the logo, meant to evoke a whirling propeller, is an improvement.
My bet is the logo does not make it past concept car use. It has to be terribly finicky to get a logo with so many separate parts right. Or there's a clear plastic part that won't age as well as the metal parts.
Yeah, they'd have to decide which colour of lettering to use with every paint colour. I think you're right that it won't make it to production, at least in its current form.
Aside from being ugly and making no sense at all, the part that gets me about these things is that it wasn't broken.
Seriously, did someone at the top of the organization wake up one day thinking "We are not selling more cars because of our logo"?
Of all the things they could have decided to work on that might actually deliver real value to customers, the logo was deemed to be important?
After owning a number of BMW's we decided we had enough, turned in our last leased car and walked away. They are horribly expensive to maintain and, even if you are willing to do some of it yourself, the parts are just ridiculously expensive.
One of the key decision drivers is that we have a Toyota vehicle with nearly 250K miles on it (400K km). We bought it new and maintained it at about 1/3 of the prescribed maintenance schedule. In other words, oil changes every 10K miles rather than the recommended 3K. The car runs very well, fuel efficiency is still good and it cost us almost nothing to maintain after the warranty ran out. With one of our prior BMW's we had to spend $3K to fix it (I forget what it was) a few months after the warranty expired. I know this is a single data point, and yet, when I talk to long-term (out of warranty) BMW owners it is amazing how often these kinds of sentiments surface.
So, yeah, I don't understand the focus on a logo. A logo isn't going to get my family back into a BMW dealership, ever. You have to question someone's priorities and understanding of their customers when they feel messing with the logo is of actual importance to them at all.
Rebranding is a thing. It allows corporations to get rid of past negative associations with the brand, be more attractive to younger audience by not looking too differently from brands they are exposed to, even just remind everyone they still exist and should be considered as a choice, things like that.
[+] [-] turbinerneiter|6 years ago|reply
Instead of embracing that, they made it flat like an App icon. It will look shit on cars and it does not communicate that BMW builds _real machines_.
Everybody is going crazy about going digital and they forget what they are good at and what the customer likes them for.
[+] [-] atoav|6 years ago|reply
If you are learning it from that basic level you cannot unsee badly unbalanced design. You cannot just remove a black background with a white one and keep everything unchanged (which is why dark themes sometimes suck as they don't get the extra love they need.
This thing looks like it has been made by the CEOs daugther in Powerpoint.
[+] [-] mastre_|6 years ago|reply
Used to. These days, not so much. And they're misfiring quite a bit. For example, the new X3 xDrive30e gets a measly 18 miles of electric range (EPA; real-world likely less). All of that added complexity and weight for very little benefit (in 2020 -- 10 years ago it would have been alright). No 3er manuals in the US anymore. Have you seen the rear of the new 3er which looks like Lexus IS? Have you seen what the 5er looks like, heck even in M5 guise? And so on, and so on.
Sry, I used to be a BMW guy and that touched (touches?) a nerve. They had the right formula when the i3 originally came out, and then someone at the top decided to effectively kill the program and most of their top EV engineers left. They would have been way ahead of where they are today, and of most of their competition, had they not intentionally shot themselves in the foot.
With that logo, it's a done deal, I'll never buy their product again. BMW was something you could identify with.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|6 years ago|reply
This evolution of the logo is bad, but not because it's flat.
[+] [-] PinguTS|6 years ago|reply
Instead BMW tries to transform its business to provide mobility. Its a service provider and the service is mobility. It is not the cars. The cars are the vehicle to provide mobility, one form of mobility.
BMW has several brands to communicate this mobility, which are ShareNOW, FreeNOW, and ReachNOW. ShareNow is what used to be DriveNow, which is the free floating carsharing. FreeNOW is the Uber-like Taxi-App. ReachNow is the Google/Apple Maps which includes public transport, Carsharing, Taxi, eScooter Rental, Bike Rental so that you can reach your desired destination the most efficient way.
[+] [-] holoduke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|6 years ago|reply
Do they? You're commenting on a thread about their logo change which suggests they don't.
BMW has for very long time been primarily a brand. Take away the brand and they simply wouldn't compete in the market. They build real machines, but not very good ones. Look at Honda if you want an example of a company that is about the machines.
[+] [-] mm89|6 years ago|reply
Everybody here is tripping for no reason.
[+] [-] remarkEon|6 years ago|reply
This Logo design change is so out of left field too, since the craze about "going digital" feels almost a decade old at this point.
[+] [-] chasing|6 years ago|reply
Is the author really concerned that BMW's design team didn't think about how this logo would be used in such fundamental ways? I can guarantee you that they did.
You can personally like or not like it, fine. But if you're going to write a judgey article about it, at least take some basic steps to try to understand why the choices were made. Companies don't just have some intern change their logo up for no reason at all.
And that headline is obnoxious.
[+] [-] awb|6 years ago|reply
Companies redesign their brand (websites, logos, etc.) all the time and it often correlates with a new hire who wants a "fresh start" with the brand.
Jens Thiemer who is the SVP of Customer and Brand and spearheaded this effort has been at BMW a little over 1 year.
It's a way of staking your claim at a company and putting your literal mark on a project. Unfortunately, it's not always the best move.
I help VPs of Marketing redesign brands and more often than not, about 6-12 months into their new gig I get a call.
[+] [-] jiofih|6 years ago|reply
Also, you think too highly of corporations. Companies literally have an intern change their logo for no reason, i’ve been that intern. There are dozens of levels of people more worried about saving face than anything else.
[+] [-] dplgk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hncensorsnonpc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kossae|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karatestomp|6 years ago|reply
OTOH it's the easiest it's been since the late 90s to make a webpage or program look "professionally designed" if you don't mind the current terrible aesthetic, so there's that.
[+] [-] selectodude|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldtopman|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.bmw.com/content/dam/bmw/marketBMWCOM/bmw_com/cat... from here: https://www.bmw.com/en/automotive-life/bmw-logo-meaning-hist...
[+] [-] vernie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootbear|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e5india|6 years ago|reply
The thing that bothers me the most about this minimalist trend is how pervasive it is. I quite like minimalism myself, but I feel like 40 years ago even within minimalism you would have expected to see some difference in execution across the globe.
Which brings me to how trendy the design field is in general. I don't think I've seen a field so uniformly go from one trend to the other and then defend it with such dogged bullshit. Who in God's name is fooled by the poetry? You're using the same design language and aesthetic as everyone else, the only thing creative is the nonsense you're writing to defend it. Why is a field full of 'creatives' so uniform in thought and expression? How many trends have we witnessed so far in web/graphic design? We've built all these powerful creative tools just so they can end up all making logos that look exactly the fucking same. Surely machine learning models can create a good percentage of the design we see today.
[+] [-] emptyfile|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samsolomon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spectramax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djmobley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|6 years ago|reply
https://cdn.instructables.com/F31/9EZA/HJKC29JK/F319EZAHJKC2...
Captured the brand, such as it was, perfectly. A small hacker company started by a man that had hacking coded into his DNA. The founder had started out phreaking at somewhere around age 8. He made a cool bit of money as a teen by custom-programming firmware for lasertag guns and upgrading guns around his hometown. The company was started because he was annoyed at how hard it was to simply get an IFFT style IOT light set up in his bathroom, securely. And so the logo: a cocky little imp creature, imo agendered, with a plug pitchfork and a goofy (optional, not always displayed) tail. Our costume-crazed QA guy even threw together a cardboard and paper-mache version of it for a halloween party once. Possible, because it was a character. It could be anthropomorphized. It represented the company identity.
Then we paid, I don't even know how much, but it didn't matter in the end anyway, for this:
https://3psnnz1ja4lg3qllb62xd6yg-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
It was supposed to be simple, I guess, and the little line was supposed to represent I guess a single connection on a silicone board? But what is that? What does it mean, what does it represent? How can we form an identity around that, how could it have represented us? We got rid of Imp Dude for no reason. Stupid.
[+] [-] blackearl|6 years ago|reply
I always thought the Red Hat breakdown of what/why changes of their logo was really well done:
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/brand/new-brand
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/brand/new-brand/details
[+] [-] riffraff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark-r|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrooched_moose|6 years ago|reply
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
I'm still not convinced it isn't satire as it has some truly breathtaking BS. Some quick highlights:
The new logo incorporates 5000 years of design (including Vastu Sastra, Golden Ratio, Feng Shui, Vitruvian Principle, and the Mobius Strip)
The Pepsi Ratio is created by two simple circles, that are in a set ratio to each other: The Golden Ratio. The Pepsi Ratio is aesthetic geometry.
Incorporates "The Earth’s Geodynamo" and "Magnetic Dynamics" to create the "The Pepsi Globe Dynamics"
Edit: A few articles about it still exist: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig... https://gawker.com/5150582/breathtaking-document-reveals-pep... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/459...
Glad it hasn't completely disappeared yet.
[+] [-] arketyp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwsprtsdy|6 years ago|reply
https://www.schemecolor.com/bmw-m.php
[+] [-] JohnFen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomtheelder|6 years ago|reply
The problem is just that they removed the black ring that is key to the logo and the brand. Add that back, and it's virtually identical to the logo they had for whole second half of the 20th century.
The removal of the black ring is unequivocally not a consequence of flat design.
[1] https://cdn.bmwblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/https-_s3...
[+] [-] dv_dt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] J-dawg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|6 years ago|reply
I challenge author, or anyone, to find any person who is unable to correctly attribute new logo to BMW but can do so with the old logo.
[+] [-] Zenst|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
[+] [-] abiogenesis|6 years ago|reply
https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T030630...
> The new logo is a new media branding and will be used in addition to the existing logo. It won’t be use (sic) on the vehicles or in the exterior and interior labeling our dealerships, the existing logo remains in use there.
[+] [-] Zigurd|6 years ago|reply
My bet is the logo does not make it past concept car use. It has to be terribly finicky to get a logo with so many separate parts right. Or there's a clear plastic part that won't age as well as the metal parts.
[+] [-] J-dawg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pembrook|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robomartin|6 years ago|reply
Seriously, did someone at the top of the organization wake up one day thinking "We are not selling more cars because of our logo"?
Of all the things they could have decided to work on that might actually deliver real value to customers, the logo was deemed to be important?
After owning a number of BMW's we decided we had enough, turned in our last leased car and walked away. They are horribly expensive to maintain and, even if you are willing to do some of it yourself, the parts are just ridiculously expensive.
One of the key decision drivers is that we have a Toyota vehicle with nearly 250K miles on it (400K km). We bought it new and maintained it at about 1/3 of the prescribed maintenance schedule. In other words, oil changes every 10K miles rather than the recommended 3K. The car runs very well, fuel efficiency is still good and it cost us almost nothing to maintain after the warranty ran out. With one of our prior BMW's we had to spend $3K to fix it (I forget what it was) a few months after the warranty expired. I know this is a single data point, and yet, when I talk to long-term (out of warranty) BMW owners it is amazing how often these kinds of sentiments surface.
So, yeah, I don't understand the focus on a logo. A logo isn't going to get my family back into a BMW dealership, ever. You have to question someone's priorities and understanding of their customers when they feel messing with the logo is of actual importance to them at all.
[+] [-] zzzcpan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Krasnol|6 years ago|reply