[anal_reactor]

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.

[mondobe]

I'll trust you on this subject, anal_reactor

[mike_hearn]

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.