This trend is far older than the AI era. The British magazine Private eye for many years in the 1990s had a running joke in which each issue displayed the new logos of old companies that had spent a fortune on rebranding. All of them were variations on circles.
Naomi Klein in her book No Logo interprets it as a form of abstraction away from the passé and less profitable business of whatever concrete task those industries used to do, and towards outsourcing, branding, and financialization as an end in itself.
Claude is the only one that looks like an asshole. The rest are just circular, or not even that. Does every circle in the world look like an asshole? Car wheels? Pizzas? Camera Lenses? Ferris wheels? This is like a Rorschach test.
Or perhaps the logo is a depiction of us, the little "products" running around burning and paying for tokens... we're certainly more receptive after a few months of subscription softening-up.
It's less about how most of them look like different stages of fisting party, and more about the fact that they have zero distinctive elements. Despite the amount of ads being shoved down my asshole, I still find it difficult to recognize different brands. Meta and Gemini being the worst offenders, if you show me these two logos in a week and ask what they are, I'd have zero clue they're even company logos. This is the level of failure we're talking about.
I think this is peak millennialism because the design is supposed to be as inoffensive as possible and therefore shows absolutely nothing.
It's not millennialism, it's driven by Apple and Google constantly changing the rules around what app icons need to look like. The logos are all just adaptations to app store rules.
1. They have to be square. That immediately eliminates basically all logos that are just the companies name and forces everyone to adopt some sort of symbol.
2. They have to have solid backgrounds and rounded corners.
3. They are supposed to match Apple's theme, whatever it is this year. In practice this means simple solid geometries and not anything too fancy or detailed.
4. They have to be recognizable at a wide range of sizes, including very small.
5. If you want your logo to appear in a notification bar then the rules get even harsher. A tiny square, no detail, and it has to make sense in black and white. Note that the ChatGPT app puts such an icon into the macOS menu bar, so a logo that didn't work in black and white and at tiny sizes would be a problem for them.
When you combine these constraints what you're left with is variants shapes that fill the area inside a square, but which are not themselves square as iOS icons are actually "squircles", which can work in colour or black and white, and which can be recognizable at small sizes. So that's what you get.
The only way out of this boring-ass Sahara Desert of visuals would be for Apple and Google to redesign their operating systems in such a way that icons no longer mattered as much, or could be non-square shaped.
The embryo, not the fetus. Pretty sure that's referring to gastrulation, where the cell blob splits into multiple layers to start cell specialization; it does this by curving in on itself, and the cavity formed by this process becomes the intestinal tract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastrulation#Protostomes_versu...
However, that all happens at the embryonic stage (around day 9). At the point where the embryo has advanced sufficiently to be called a fetus (around week 9), the body has already sufficiently developed so that it's impossible to say where "fetal development" starts: https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php?titl...
Some still do: it's called a gastrovascular cavity, and is present in marine invertebrates such as Cnidaria (jellyfish, coral polyps, anemones), Ctenophores (comb jellies); Platyhelminthes (flatworms, tapeworms).
Yes because the spokes are the lines that go to the center
> Camera [apertures]?
100% - they even "wink"
> Does every circle in the world look like an asshole?
Well every asshole is circular and every person has an asshole so we are biased toward seeing them everywhere. Any prominently placed circle will always trigger an evolutionary reaction. Do I:
A) Sniff it
B) Hump it
C) Bite it
D) Vibe code slop with it?
Why do you think so many squares work in tech? It's because they don't hire assholes (circles)
All due respect, but is anyone's asshole actually circular? Asking as most asshole seem to me to be squished closed and more starry-slat-like. Functionally speaking a circular asshole would be terrible; sphincters are important.
The logos do look too canonically similar in general, though. :(
Great... now every time I look at a fresh pizza in the delivery box, cross-cut into 8 slices, I will think of Vonnegut's drawing and buttholes.
Thanks a lot, SkyMarshal, for putting this association in my head!!
OpenAI's own logo description was also written by you-know who: https://openai.com/brand/ The part I find funny is "right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands" while the logo is hexagonal and has no right angles at all. Precision and structure not included!
No, they're definitely the reverse. They're "the singularity." Most obviously clear in Grok's which is a literal pictogram of a black hole. But these are entities that suck things up, not produce things.
The mental model of the superintelligence, to a true believer, is much more like a thing that consumes our world (hopefully for the better) rather than a thing that exists within the world and "produces stuff" in it.
Perfect analogy for AI actually a reverse butt-hole that sucks up the internet like a blackhole and then you go to it and it shits out as much of an answer as you are willing to feed it by massaging it with electrical stimulation. And now our digital world is being contaminated with all of this digital fecal matter further hastening the enshittingulatity.
"Why so many brands change their logos and look like everybody else".
In the past year(s) I have noticed a few icons in my Android phone turning into the same thing.
For a long time there was Uber, white on black. And then others thought white on black was the cool thing to join in on, making the reduced icons of the following look the same : Uber, Soundcloud (they kept their sigil at least), Swile, Qobuz, myNoise. I'm sure if I installed more junk I'd have seen more.
Even myNoise who goes against tech grain! To their credit, they added an orange circle background to it sometime this spring. Soundcloud execs woke up and went back to their trademark orange. But, heck.
The OpenAI logo and “swirling hexagon” in general is reminiscent of the old logo of SNET (Southern New England Telephone), except it’s a pentagon. I used to draw this on my book covers at school to make life feel more engaging.
IIRC, circular maNDalas as per Jung draw your attention towards its center, which is the most important part of the maNDala. For Jung, the circular maNDala represented the self - the totality of the psyche - with the center representing its organizing principle. I've noticed how this pattern naturally arises in circular flowers, with the petals serving to draw the bee in to the center where the reproductive structures and nectar are located.
I realize that I am not really helping matters much, but thought would mention this anyway.
Reminds me of the Telecom New Zealand rebranding. The old logo: the word Telecom, with lines through the "o" reminiscent of wires passing through a loading coil. The old name: Telecom (obviously) as in telecommunications. Conveys: We do phones. We do wires. We do long distance talking.
The new logo: basically identical to Claude's current one but blue. The new name: Spark. Conveys: absolutely nothing, the blank slate business, our executives don't actually know what we do.
>> The new logo: basically identical to Claude's current one but blue. The new name: Spark. Conveys: absolutely nothing, the blank slate business, our executives don't actually know what we do.
This is my experience as well, people drawn to leadership in our present time often have absolutely no idea about anything except the -idea- of business. Which of course makes things vaguely "professional" seeming while they effectively destroy businesses/organisations.
I have a dirty mind, but I don't agree that all of them look like that.
Claude is definitely looks like an external rectal sphincter. Grok is a ring that men have used for erectile dysfunction.
I guess it has to do with the fact that everything is greyscale nowadays ... did you notice there are no more coloured cars, and the few that are there are all faded.
The cars are primarily an efficiency thing; it's more efficient to just make a few colours. The requirement for those colours to be boring _may_ be coming to an end, though; see the Renault 5. It only comes in five colours, but two of those are yellow and green. Anecdotally, pretty much every Renault 5 I see around is yellow or green, so apparently people like it.
I'm guessing limited car colors benefits the manufacturers more so than the customer. Less choice means less cost. Additionally, by avoiding 'polarizing' colors, they likely won't have issues with unsellable stock.
A man goes to a psychiatrist. To start things off, the psychiatrist suggests they start with a Rorschach Test. He holds up the first picture and asks the man what he sees.
"A man and a woman making love in a park," the man replies.
The psychiatrist holds up the second picture and asks the man what he sees.
"A man and a woman making love in a boat."
He holds up the third picture.
"A man and a woman making love at the beach."
This goes on for the rest of the set of pictures; the man says he sees a man and a woman making love in every one of the pictures. At the end of the test, the psychiatrist looks over his notes and says, "It looks like you have a preoccupation with sex."
And the man replies, "Well, you're the one with the dirty pictures."
Circle is the perfect shape. Take a rock, throw it in a water, you get circular ripple. Throw a brick, circular ripple. Throw a bicycle, circular ripple.
Talking about bad design what on earth is going on with Amazon's new fav-icon, it's the same reddish-orange as Alibaba and Aliexpress and looks utterly unremarkable.
The ever-failing attempt to attain the ever-eluding meaning that is always beyond all words and other means to express it.
The knowledge that can never be caught into a fixed form. The Mercury of alchemists.
The paradox of "war is peace", "slavery is freedom" and the like, and both the promise to solve it (by striving to close the gap between Ouroboros' mouth and tail), and eternal damnation of the elusive drift of all meanings in its unresolved state.
A certain 3rd entity around which the duality of the visible world evolves and revolves, remaining out of its scope, which is better expressed by the Caduceus.
Also, the attempt to conceal that invisible third hermetically, which always fails without failing, fractally and recursively generating all the spectrum of meanings from this single underlying paradox, the resolution of which was sought after by alchemists in the form of Lapis Philosophorum.
I could go on and on, but this can only be experienced, not expressed.
What if, your brain is over-sexualized and you are obsessed with butthole, to the point your mind associate almost all round objects/shapes with buttholes? Maybe the logo's aren't the problem but rather degeneracy stuck in the brain. Now, think of a doughnut. Disgusting. :p
Maybe author watched too many dog videos? Every dog face looks like anus, it can defecate and lick in both direction. Once you go dog, entire world is your a toliet and every thing turns into buthole!
Dead bird on road? Better lick it, not to miss its cloaka!
Naomi Klein in her book No Logo interprets it as a form of abstraction away from the passé and less profitable business of whatever concrete task those industries used to do, and towards outsourcing, branding, and financialization as an end in itself.