Episode 95: Back to Basics

This week, Jessica and Michael continue the stormy discussion that designer Mirko Ilic started on Linkedin when he declared, “Interesting logos are being replaced by boring ones.”

Michael says this trend

is actually something that almost seems not just understandable but to a certain degree frighteningly inevitable…Designers and people building brands are well aware of the fact that there is still the requirement to have some indestructible kernel of identity that can travel across any platform or any channel.

Also mentioned this week:

Brand New on Burberry, Balmain, Berluti, Balenciaga (2017)
Gary Hustwit, Helvetica
excerpts from Wim Crouwel + Jan van Toorn, The Debate (2015)
Dezeen, Peter Saville to “do a YSL” for Kanye West
Episode 43: The End Is Near
Jessica’s catalog essay from David Pease: Notes from the Road
Nicholas Rougeux, Byrne’s Euclid
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Subscribe to The Observatory on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, or follow Design Observer on Spotify or Soundcloud.

Posted in: Arts + Culture, The Observatory

Comments [0]

Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati, and has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1990. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

More from Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand

From the Archive: Georgia Lupi
Giorgia Lupi is a partner in the design firm Pentagram and an artist whose data-driven work is at MOMA in New York.

Episode 106: The Twenty
The large Democratic field and the first 2020 debate, Harriet Tubman on the $20, Peter Saville’s cover for Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures,“ Edie McClurg.

From the Archive: Forest Young
Forest Young is head of design and a global principal at the branding consultancy Wolff Olins who recently completed the Uber redesign.

Episode 105: Malta, Marketing, Make-Believe
Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, Malta, The West Wing Weekly podcast, branded empathy, Chernobyl, Caravaggio’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist

Episode 104: Fade to White
Facebook’s redesign, Morning Edition’s new theme, Cris Shapan, Stanley Kubrick at the London Design Museum.

Jobs | June 26