I know it’s quite an insignificant bit of enshittification but I still feel a bit miffed that every logo these days looks the same.
I know it’s quite an insignificant bit of enshittification but I still feel a bit miffed that every logo these days looks the same.
Logos don’t need to be readable. Logos need to be instantly, and unmistakably recognizable. McDonald’s logo is the big yellow M. It’s not “readable”, because it’s not a word. But, the entire world instantly recognizes the logo, regardless of whether they can read English.
I agree with OP, they’re doing a disservice to themselves by simplifying their logos to plain text.
It also dilutes their branding when translated into different languages/writing scripts.
That McDonald’s ‘M’ is instantly recognizable in every language, even languages that don’t use Latin-derived letters.
But if your logo is plain text, how do you translate it into Cyrillic or Kanji? You either have to develop a completely new logo for those regions (hurting your worldwide recognizability) or you just roll with the English logo and have to deal with most of the locals seeing it as completely unintelligible.
Completely depends on the circumstance. Do logos of global icons like McDonald’s, Apple or Volkswagen’s need to be readable? No. Of course not because they’re everywhere. Does your local electrician’s logo need to be readable because it’s literally just their family name? Yes. Yes, it absolutely needs to be readable.
Pretty sure the definition of readable covers what you are saying. Things don’t have to be necessarily a word or legible to be readable.
For instance, if I put two railroad spikes together in a off set plus and ask a Christian, “Is this readable as a Christian symbol?” That would be acceptable.