[tcldr]

Q: Why do everyone’s logo fonts look the same?

A: Because they need to be legible on a mobile device.

It’s no coincidence this trend started in the 2010s with the arrival of the smartphone. Brands need a consistent look that work across mediums. With over 50% of e-commerce sales happening on mobile, and the dominance of social media in the marketing of, for example, high fashion, a brand mark must excel in these kinds of treatments. Perhaps we’ll find another design trick to facilitate legibility at smaller scales but until then, those marks that looked great in print, aren’t fit for purpose.

[delta_p_delta_x]

Funnily enough, many phone displays have much higher pixel densities than notebook, desktop, and TV displays, and thus would have little problems rendering the serifs, ligatures, and other fancy bits of digital serif typefaces compared to the old 72/96 DPI displays from the late '90s and early 2000s.

Semi-unrelated rant: why do many entirely digital web typefaces have ink traps? They look terrible. On paper, they were meant to be filled in by overflowing ink and thus render the glyphs as intended, but they just look weird and bad on a high-resolution digital display.

[tcldr]

I’m aware. But when you’re trying to set a tiny brand mark over a photo in the corner of some social media thumbnail, a screen’s fidelity is not the limiting factor, it’s the human eye.

[shakow]

> why do many entirely digital web typefaces have ink traps?

Add it to the many things that made it from the necessary to the aesthetic.

[Kwpolska]

The pixel density might have increased, but phone screens fit less information than desktop screens, so the logo can't take up as much space. The goal isn't good reproduction, but rather improving legibility and recognisability at small physical sizes.

[dimmke]

I have written two blog posts that sort touch on this subject. The increase in screen pixel density has had a much larger impact on web design as a discipline than is commonly acknowledged.

https://daniel.do/article/making-noisy-svgs/ (I link to the second post in the first paragraph)

[avereveard]

True about the definition, but portrait consumption remains a problem, the horizontal space on the header is much smaller, and many old school logos that worked on stores and websites would end up on two lines on mobiles.

[ilumanty]

Serifs improve legibility of small prints. With modern HiDPI screens, there is no reason not to use serif fonts across all media.

[tcldr]

Sure, a restricted subset of serifs and typically when you’re reading a run of text i.e body copy. But the typical neoclassical serifs used in high fashion (think the Vogue logo) with their hairline serifs will look awful scaled to the sizes needed on mobile – regardless of screen definition.

[dannyw]

You generally have to cater to the lowest common denominator, like that $150 prepaid Android phone with a non-HiDPI screen.

Or someone on a 1336x720 Chromebook.

[a1o]

I think we all used Times New Roman for writing in 800x600 desktop CRTs with 15" curved displays and could read just fine.

[dylan604]

And they had pixels the size of fingernails. Being able to see the pixels was not something that helped in the reading of anything

[marginalia_nu]

15" CRTs were physically significantly larger than anything mobile today.

[atoav]

But your corp very likely wants to look young and fresh and not like a very serious, but ultimately boring lawyer agency.

Serif fonts are still existant, with newspapers, lawyers, notaries and aimilar professions. Most modern corporations just don't want to go that direction, because this isn't how they want to be perceived.

[lagt_t]

The very few actual studies revealed there is no difference in legibility between typefaces that differ only in the presence or absence of serifs.

[bloopernova]

Thank you for putting into words something that's I've been wondering about.

Offtopic:

I switched from MPlus Code font to Iosevka just this week for my terminal, VSCode, and Emacs use. Partly due to finding Iosevka more pleasing, its support for ligatures, and liking its italics.

Looking at it now, MPlus is a little simpler while Iosevka has a bit more... Personality?

MPlus: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#mplus

Iosevka: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#iosevka

Iosevka has a few serif-like features that distinguish it from MPlus, and on the hidpi screens I use, it's easier on my aging eyesight.

[Zekio]

Serif fonts read terribly on displays of basically any size and dpi, I don't even use them when reading books on e-ink displays

[Shorel]

That's your (arguably wrong) opinion.

Some of the most beautiful and enjoyable fonts I have used in my 300-dpi e-book reader have serifs.

- Ancizar

- Bookerly

- Imperial (the one used by NYTimes)

- Palatino

[Zekio]

and yet the default font on a kindle is still a sans serif font named Amazon Ember

[Shorel]

I also like that one.

And Calibri, which is a font that can't decide if it wants to have serifs or not.

I can't have enough fonts.

[checkyoursudo]

Serif fonts read fine on any screen with at least a pixel density of Apple's Retina displays. Subjective preferences are another matter, of course. I prefer serifs even on worse displays, because my brain decodes them better. And I will basically refuse to read sans serif in print, or rather, my brain refuses to comply anyway.

[vitaflo]

It’s the same reason all UX Design went super flat. Flat geometric shapes and text are easier to display at various widths and size’s across a lot of different types of devices. Doing anything more complicated than colored in wireframes is too expensive to produce especially when time to market is important.

As a UX designer I hate this but that’s the reality of why every site has the same boring flat design.

[Dalewyn]

Text is also going out of fashion because supporting multiple languages is expensive compared to just a single set of hieroglyphs for everyone everywhere in the world.

[ghaff]

It started before then. My school switched from a rather elegant 19th century (I think) design to something more streamlined that I never really liked around 2000. But I don't really disagree in general. I know when my company did a rebrand, one of the drivers was that the old logo had a lot of fine detail. (It also had some aspects that you couldn't unsee once someone mentioned them and it basically got the company's name wrong--which still gets people confused to this day.)