Ferno

This bothers me more than it should.

We seem to be moving away from unified and expressive logos that integrate their well known symbols with the text all in one, to very "cold & corporate" looking text logos that look typed from any old font, but with diminished versions of the well known symbols beside them so you don't forget who they were/ are completely. Just feels like "inside voice" versions of once loud and proud logos as a whole imo

Could you imagine the Disney Logo looking like that

Let's hope Fedex doesn't decide to do this.

I really love logo designs because it's a lot like looking at a silhouette. You can see just a piece of them out of the corner of your eye (well, I do this) and you immediately make an association with it. Like you said, these still have the symbols that are associated with them, but they're much more generic and aren't really one with the type anymore. If I saw that staple standalone, I won't even know what it is anymore. The original logo was a much more clever use of the imagery and lettering coming together. Hell, I would have thought the check mark in Verizon's logo was for TurboTax if I didn't see the name.

Like, shit, is FedEx going to take out that arrow imagery from the "Ex"

edit: lol Ed and I had the same thought but I didn't see it until the refresh

Meanwhile-

Before:

After:

🍔 BURGER KING™

My local Staples has a different logo.

It was a shame because I used to buy stuff from them, regularly.

What the heck THATS THE BEST BUY LOGO NOW????

You forgot the Sam's Club and Walmart logos...

The stark contrast between the SEGA Logo and the Logo of their parent company, SegaSammy Holdings, is also something.

The funny thing about this is that my older brother who studied graphic design in school to compliment his game design classes would actually call this an improvement based off what is currently being taught. It's all about those clean, uncluttered modern lines and simplifying as much as possible. I tried arguing with him before about the sterility of everyone following the same design mentality and he simply accused me of not understanding how important a clean and easy to read logo is.

Of course this isn't the first place I've seen this design sterility either. I remember for a while all way too many video game and movie box arts were using the exact same composition and use of blue and orange to create certain contrast. I naturally argued with my brother that it all looked the same at a glance and was resultantly uninteresting and he simply shot me down by saying that the idea is to grab the viewer's attention so they look at the details. For some reason the idea that the details don't matter if everything looks the same from a afar didn't sit well with him.

Then their is also the AAA developer obsession with hyper/photo realistic graphics and character design with minimalistic hubs making way to many games look the same at first glance. I remember walking on my dad watching some gameplay video's online one day and thought that Shadow of the Tomb Raider was The Last of Us Part 2 due to the location, ambient atmosphere, and Reboot Lara effectively being stripped of pretty much all of Lara's identifiable design elements including her blue colored shirt during the scene he was watching. It was yet another casualty of the sterility of uniform design.

I know a lot of people frown upon the bombastic over-the-top indulgence of the 90s, but at least in the 90s everyone had a style all their own and were proud to wear that style. Now everyone is going to the same design schools taught by the same teachers out of the same books and are sacrificing individuality for something that only bores people. The system may work for making money, but unquestionably do I find it soulless. 

the worst / most insulting one of these was easily nickelodeon

going from a "splat" blob that could be expanded to take up almost any shape imaginable

and sterilizing it down to this:

even the logo they had in the early-mid 80s (pre-nicktoons/golden age) was more unique

@Thigolf Well, if wanna talk Disney, notice how the Disney Channel logo did away with the "screen/television" motif with the 2000s logo, and the 2010s logo overhaul heavily de-emphasized the mickey mouse ears (the only remnants of it is are the ears added to the dotted i in the  "disney" text)

80s/90s

late 90s/early 2000s

2000s/early 2010s

current logo

@Sonic Fan J Kinda makes me wonder what my old graphic design professor would have felt about these logos. I’d imagine he’d find these current ones to be like bare minimum first design drafts (he always made us create dozens to hundreds of drafts for a logo before we even considered picking the few that worked, since in his mind the first few dozen you made were usually the worst, and that it was only by constantly stretching your creativity to the limit that you’d find something that works, and not just use the first thing you came up with).

Also not to toot my own horn, but it kinda says something when I could probably make something less boring  despite being a relatively mediocre student and designer overall.

It's a shame @SenEDDtor Missile that no one seems to share that mentality anymore. Creativity is being exchanged for low cost and easy profit resulting in this sterile mess right now. Unfortunately that's become the trend of most businesses nowadays; maximize immediate profits and bailout if things show even the slightest signs of not working. No one believes in nurturing the truly creative and balk at the idea of taking risks and establishing a powerfully unique identity simply because market trends and research says the most immediate money lies in the sterile and constrained. At least though out of the above examples that have been shared the Disney logo still uses Walt's signature though I'm for certain a company as greedy as Disney would gladly scrap even that if there were evidence that  new lifeless logo would make more money. I think the only thing really stopping that from happening is that it would still cost more money to hire someone to even crank out even the most bland first idea than to just keep using the current one unchanged.

Still, we could definitely do to have more people in charge who think like your old design teacher.

@Sonic Fan J To be fair, at the end of the day it’s the client who ends up deciding what they think works, and what the client thinks and what the designer thinks works doesn’t always mesh very well.

It’s the end result of dealing with people who don’t really understand Graphic Design; you basically have to find a way to sell the merits of a design that works while still making sure you stay within the requirements of the client so that you don’t end up making something they don’t want at all.

That's true @SenEDDtor Missile, though it also doesn't help when the designers get elitist either.

For example, my older brother was talking about how he was going over the portfolio's of prospective hires for the company he works for and anyone who had little to no "modern designs" examples that fit the sterile mentality he didn't even give a second look. The client demand for the sterile is killing even the chance for people with different design mentalities to get their foot in the door and that's horrible.

It's not even that I have anything against the ignorance of companies in the field and their mindless reliance on numbers exclusively, but I kind of wish the desperate need to minimize any and all spending didn't exist so that way these designers could have a chance and you could maybe take my dad's approach to selling; show them a number of things that work but don't show them what they want until last or by itself just to get them thinking of other options. Then considering how my brother talks about how some of his teachers say you should be able to go from thought in your head through all of the prototypes and concepts to final design in 24 hours there is little lost in cost and efficiency.

Maybe though I'm just letting myself dream too big though due to my disdain of the sterile and uniform look that everyone is leaning towards. Sheesh, even neighborhoods are following suit to where everywhere you go looks the same and has no personality and/or character.

*somersaults into krispy kreme sign, destroying it*

What what'dja expect?

Also I guess for my next batch when I'm "officially" open again, I'm probably gonna have to mention upfront that I won't be doing much in the way of complicated machinery and/or armor anymore. I tend to get those types of commissions often and I always wonder how seeing as most of my art is really simplistic and doesn't really advertise that I'm good at really complex stuff tbh.

Hmmm, curious to know what your rates are.

They may raise soon, but currently I do a flat rate of $25 per character.

i heard this absolute banger playing at an H&M once but I couldn't remember the lyrics well enough to look it up later and Im still mad about it

Its like, I remember the melody, and the key it was in, etc. But it was too muffled at the time to ever make out the lyrics so I'll never be able to look it up that way. So now it'll always just be in my head as a muffled auditory mass.

>Gangnam Style was 2012

time be movin

But what if it had vehicles, guns and swearing and was considered good? 

How did it fail 3 times?

1: 2004- The 4kids dub, off to a bad start, low(?) ratings, eventually booted off 4kids TV and they tried airing it on Toonami for awhile.

2: 2007- The Funimation dub, kept going and it's unclear what kinda ratings it had at the time but it eventually got booted off Toonami and a few months later Toonami as a whole died for a few years.

3: 2013 - The return of the Funimation dub on the revived Toonami block on Adult Swim, aired from 2013 - 2017, apparently booted off due to either low viewership, the show being one of the more expensive ones to keep on the block at the time, or a combo of both.

I'll say that its probably sadly not going to be mainstream in the US but hope that it does at least have a sizeable fanbase for dubs on streaming services and DVD/Blu-ray releases outside of the Bandai games. It's a shame that something that you like doesn't take off... Then again its the case where it might be a success in one country but a failure in another, Sailor Moon being a case. Famous and mainstream in the English speaking countries except for the UK that for some reason still gets the merchandise for it even though no one knows who the characters are... Pure headscratcher when you go to a store and see merchandise of the characters selling those along with Deadpool, Goku, Stranger Things and Batman.

If you think that's bad, try being a Lupin the 3rd fan outside of Japan, Italy and even the US.

Lupin never even crossed my mind as "ugly" tho imo. Infact I sorta see him on a scale from between average, to sorta attractive when you think of him from within the style of the show's universe itself rather than comparing him to the sparkly-eyed handsome anime guys from other anime.

This video is an accurate depiction of my mood right now

American and Japanese voice acting are basically seen the same way by the opposite fanbase.

Just a whole lot of screaming.

I just finished seeing Zombieland Saga 

The main male character English VA proves this point wrong right off the bat

Boy, as someone who prefers subs more often than not because of bad voice acting (though primarily because there is too much lost in translation that even someone with my scrap of s of knowledge of the Japanese language picks up on or even drastic character changes) even I know that that is a load of hogwash. There is some great American voice acting that is rich with emotion and heart and will rip your heart right out.

Just to name some top examples off the top of my head

Video Games: Red Dead Redemption 2
Movies: Most Pixar, Disney, and even a number of DreamWorks films
Web Shows: RWBY a couple of seasons in

So when I hear hyperbole like this it's just a bit ridiculous sounding to me. If I typically complain about anything in the states it's inconsistent quality and 90s 00s Funimation grade voice directors (I haven't listened too much to Funimation voice acting in years though Dragon Ball Super: Brolly did kind of make me wish I could have watched the sub). My favorite example for that inconsistency is easily Roger Craig Smith in Soul Calibur V. His acting for Ezio is spot on and sounds just like he did over in Assassin's Creed, but then his Siegfried is so stiff and corny without any real emotion it's just laughable. And this is the same VA in the same game. The only difference he should be dealing with is the characters but based on his vastly different performances in quality it's obvious that the voice and general directing of his acting is on a totally different level between Assassin's Creed and Soul Calibur V.

So no, I don't blame the actors when I hear bad voice acting (well outside of questioning why they didn't give their all anyway) anywhere near as much as I blame the general and voice directing. As a result general hyperbole like the OP points out just makes me laugh, especially since I've heard obviously bad acting even with subs (Sonic Adventure comes to mind and boy did they improve in a hurry after that one 🤣).