Design Crimes: corporations ditching classic logos for newer logos that are duds

http://www.commarts.com/CA/feadesign_d/timeline/inside/images/137.gif

new:

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/images/at-t-logo.jpg

xp

so is that

http://static.flickr.com/55/109581899_9c989dd23b.jpg

Still, if nothing else, trying to change the thing reminds you of what you liked about the classic version in the first place.

http://www.ponyvillagemall.com/images/directory/full/41bcf56dac85d.jpg

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/04/red_blue/image/exxon.jpg

http://www.markvictorhansen.com/images/cnn.gif

2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1130000/images/_1130544_tt150.jpg

3. http://www.allaboutweybridge.co.uk/aaw/images/poferries_logo.gif

New one looks like a disgruntled kid!

Reminds me of 'Look In' magazine.

For fuck's sake. The old logo was the only thing that set Payless apart from the other cheap shoe stores.

I also like the "spoon" in the new FedEx.

No bowtie, no credibility.

xp

this however is glorious, especailly @ night (although not so much in this picture, best i could find)

Yesterday I noticed that Zappos had changed their logo:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRE5UjJFzujusXLArfOJVvtuEQOzWCdhhTn1w&s
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQJGazGqTONsP5TjMgBhgggAV3Vv88PrR1dHQ&s

I bought a lot of stuff from them in the past and that blue accent on the logo gave their boxes a distinct identity.

they shoulda made it more simple— sans serif, fewer colors, less bold. maybe not even letters. they should have just reduced it to a vague feeling or memory.

I feel like I've seen a lot of corporate redesigns that basically streamline the logo to something approaching the Clarendon typeface, just like the Zappos one. Cracker Barrel is one step away from that.

All corporate logos should be like wordless ribbons, twisting in the air

I wanna dunk my balls in it (?)

Dunkin' D'nuts

I LOVE... EVERYTHING?

whoops... maybe not

Cracker Barrel shed almost $100 million in market value after its stock plunged Thursday following the release of a new logo. The new design eliminates a longstanding drawing of an overall-clad man leaning against a barrel, in favor of a cleaner logo featuring just the chain's name.

Some longtime Cracker Barrel fans took to social media to express disappointment with the company's new logo, with some calling on the chain to change it back.

"The new rebrand took the feeling away," one person wrote on Cracker Barrel's Instagram. "Cold and sterile."

Another said, "I’m feeling like this new logo is ruining my life."

Cracker Barrel fans

didn't realize this was a thing

I get that change can be hard. What I don't get is why some people think that this change is "woke"??

And by some people I mean Rep. Byron Donalds:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:ks3gpa6ftoyaq7hmf6c4qx4c/bafkreiczvk3mays2drj6gat4o6hy32cdke5ypivognbyvdeaq4b635soku@jpeg

yeah if anything this is a KFC-like attempt to approach something more generic, shed of any associations with any specific place or any specific past. i never thought about it, but the old logo was one of the last vestiges of 1970s restaurant branding/design, with all that visual excess and clutter. TGI Friday's and Pizza Hut's slashed theirs down years ago. Apparently Steak & Ale still have theirs, although that's partly because they went bankrupt in 2008 and only have one or two restaurants still in existence.

they're trying to take away our white heritage!!!

xxp wait he gave Christ a blowjob in the CB parking lot?

So apparently they found out that the current CEO is a woman... that's why they went woke, and got rid of the cracker man

Vance was all over this

(where were all these anti-wokers when they rebranded KFC??)

I heard (or read?) somewhere that businesses that used affected Ks in place of Cs for things like "Kountry Kitchen" were a thinly (if at all) veiled sign of alignment with racist/segregationist values and the KKK. Now I see it everywhere.

There was an urban myth when I was a teenager that there were three Ks in the design of the Marlborough cigarette packet.

So apparently they found out that the current CEO is a _woman_... that's why they went woke, and got rid of the cracker man

Vance was all over this

Good he’s keeping busy

That OG CB logo is pretty sick. The font looks like an early 80's political thriller paperback.

I feel like I've been in a Cracker Barrel once twenty years ago (on tour) but didn't eat anything because I was hungover

It's not the worst road trip chain restaurant. Better than Denny's.

The only one I've ever seen somehow ended up a very good Thai restaurant/cooking school but still retained its name, which I can't believe they'd continue paying franchise fees for, so I just assumed Cracker Barrel was a slipshod neglectful company who would not even notice if every single one of their locations turned into a Thai cooking school and just stopped paying.

lol

actually it's the Kra Khao Barrel but they just haven't bothered to change the sign

hmm, i think i'm seeing why he's so upset

https://i.imgur.com/iVpcq7a.png

he is so full of shit

(that's a quote from Hillbilly Elegy)

no one wants to admit that the tariffs caused the man, chair, and barrel to be too expensive to maintain

Hillbilly Elegy is full of shit as well, fuck that knob goblin

In the 90s I worked at a place called po folks. They later dropped the po and then subsequently went out of business

Hillbilly Elegy is full of shit as well, fuck that knob goblin

I would not couch it in those terms

ahh okay, I didn't know it meant that as well

https://www.crackerbarrel.com/about/uncle-herschel

^ Features a statuary monument of Uncle Herschel listening to a woman.

OK, having one of those rough nights where I can't pick a side.

https://i.imgur.com/F7pRJw4.png

https://i.imgur.com/DLEn7uo.png

https://i.imgur.com/3TEe9Mq.png

I'm definitely going to pay closer attention to the t-shirts in the gift shop next time.

Celebrate Halloween with Cracker Barrel’s Spooktacular Collection

I mean, it's not just me, right? I'm not going to point it out, but it can't just be me.

Cracker Barrel fans

didn't realize this was a thing

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, August 22, 2025 5:47 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Check out autobiographies from the various Ramones. Cracker Barrel was a rare place they could all agree on while touring (between NYC & Florida anyway). Johnny grumpily ate gas station sardines in the Cracker Barrel parking lot while considering the others to be wasting their food stipend inside; Dee Dee hid drugs in their favoured Cracker Barrels because he could pick them up on the way back, and they had a major band bust up there at least once, iirc amplified by a changed menu item. I never pass a Cracker Barrel without thinking about them.

Ramones tour manager Monte Melnick:

On the road we'd discover certain restaurants that we liked and try to find them along the way. Cracker Barrel and Bob Evans were two of our favorites. We discovered with Cracker Barrel that, if you were a known band, and usually all the waiters and dishwashers knew us, you can get free meals in exchange for some autographed photos. I'd bring along stacks of promotional photos for this very purpose. I would get the national directories and in the morning we'd plot where the closest Cracker Barrel was.

Dee Dee Ramone giving me a new braintwister that's more fun than that stupid golf tee game.

https://i.imgur.com/2lXqdvr.jpeg

I want to bring up a different design crime. This logo:
https://thedogtale.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/farmers-dog-logo.png

Somebody, who was presumably paid to try hard to do good work, robbed their client. On the other hand, I have no reason to GAF about the client. The logo still makes me mad. 45 seconds of "work"

lol, it looks suspiciously like they forgot to switch on the layers that contained a happy cartoon dog and farmer on the right-hand side.

Right?! There's no apparent reason for the text to be off-center; the blob looks like a tomato, which isn't dog food; and the text looks like the first free font somebody found online (except the lowercase Es and Rs are different from each other, so I guess this is hand-scrawled by a right-handed person using their left hand, and the g looks like a 9).

I'd been thinking about how people don't seem to be embarrassed by typos or malaprops as much maybe because it signals that you're human? So maybe incompetence is a deliberate aesthetic? Like if this is for a dogfood company, it signals that the dogfood is human-made slop, not machine-made slop.

xxxp the idea that there may still be drugs stashed in various Cracker Barrels courtesy of Dee Dee Ramone makes me want to actually visit one (with my dog, of course)

There's no apparent reason for the text to be off-center

Also, the designer probably presented several versions, with the text in different positions, and someone decided this one was the way to go.

...with the reasoning that it makes it look interesting... and here we are talking about it :/

Yeah, I don't want to give this crap too much oxygen — especially since I hijacked a thread whose remit it doesn't really fit to gripe about it. But I see ads for this product every day on a phone game I otherwise enjoy, and had to have a little blowup.

You're not hijacking nothin.

https://i.imgur.com/UOrlzaM.png

In fact, I'm a bit tickled that someone offered whatever that is above to a designer and said, "What can you do with this?" and the response was, "I dunno, something shittier?"

omg lol