One problem with the new Burger King logo is that the buns have become shiny. Are they greasy, or made of plastic? The colors favor the latter. The old logo was a clear message: we sell hamburgers. The new one has added bunch of motion but lost the original graphic meaning. Is the blue swoopy supposed to be a mouth? Is that why the burger is tilted, because it’s tipping down my throat? If so 1) why are my lips blue (am I being poisoned?) and 2) why am I swallowing an entire burger in one bite? Maybe my lips are blue because I’m choking because I’m trying to swallow an entire plastic burger. The result is certainly a lo tmore exciting – what happens next? can the medics revive me? – but less like food, so perhaps more accurate overall.

The old Bank of New York logo was pretty dated – an odd combination of aiming for a solid typeface but arranging the words off balance. The new logo – oh dear!

The overall design of both DC logos looks fine, but the new one looks unfinished. I guess they wanted the faux 3D effect that is so in vogue now to increase the “energy” of the logo, but the old logo used positive and negative space better than the new one, and consequently its use of color was bolder. The new logo looks graphically exciting and better emphasizes the text over the graphic but is chromatically anemic. That hurts enough to make this a step down that could have been a step up.

The FedEx improvement is the best. Fewer syllables, greater visibility, and even improved graphics, since the hidden arrow says more about their business than the diagonal border between the two halves of the old rectangle ever did. Adding the Word “Express” after “FedEx” – and with the new logo including the hidden arrow – seems a tad insistent, but if they’re going to overemphasize anything that’s the right choice.

The new Intel’s stereotyped swooshy oval isn’t particularly innovative, but overall it’s an improvement over the old letter-”e”-falling-out-of-the-name logo, which was never exactly reassuring. And if any sector of the computer industry could make any claims to leaping ahead, it would be the hardware half of the house rather than the software half, so there’s more legitimacy to this claim than most people will ever realize. It is only the raging success of hardware vendors like Intel that has prevented The Software Crisis from bringing all of our computers to a grinding halt. I write this as a career programmer.

The new Kodak logo is far more legible, and although it loses the graphic representation of capturing a photo the old logo had, did anyone else notice the new “d” is actually a schematic representation of a film cartridge seen from above. Now just pull the ascender of the “d” up to the other spindle and close the back of the camera to load your Kodak in your camera. . . .

Of course the new LDS logo is worlds better than the old one. I may be an atheist, but even I know “Jesus Christ” is the most important part of their name. Besides, the old logo, like the old Bank of New York logo, had that tottering, off-balance look, which is not what you want for an institution concerned with eternity.

I don’t like either of the Pizza Hut logos. What is up with the letters “z” and “H” in the old one; are the swoopy lines supposed to be pizza dough spinning as it is thrown up in the air? If so, why is it hanging off of letters. The new one looks like a sketch, and sketchy is not what I hope for in food, unless we’re talking innovation, which we’re not. The real problem, though is the name: why a hut? Logo designers are always going to be handicapped if they have to make visual sense out of a nonsensical name? Thanks to the previous respondent, I too now see a red hat with a strange face beneath it in both logos.

Nor do I like either Quark logo. I don’t know why the A in the first logo is made to stand out, nor do I see any other particular graphic significance other than unity of the letters into a logo. As for the new one, that strangely stylized Q graphic looks like a cam off a camshaft, which puts me faintly in mind of a car engine. Maybe some variant of this could be used as a logo for the Toyota Camry, a nice car whose name has always confused me, but I don’t see what it has to do with typesetting. Perhaps a document, or a page, or a book, or a press, or something along those lines could have been adapted into a suitable graphic. Also, for software supposed to help with fine typography, the new typeface itself is surprisingly clumsy.

Neither Sprint logo is ideal, but the new one looks so much like a corporate merger compromise – bland and disconnected. The new graphic is somewhat interesting, but is largely unrelated to the bland sans-serif typeface or to the bland yellow rectangle. The old Sprint graphic far better conveys the notion of sprinting, as does the idea of an italic typeface, though I would have chosen something whose angles better matched the angles of the graphic; likewise the colors of the old graphic and old type had little to do with each other. A redesign should have worked closely with the old logo’s strengths and just fixed its weaknesses. As for the old NEXTEL logo, bland bland bland.

The new UPS logo is a far stronger graphic, and the typeface is better unified – the old one alternated upper and lower case to no good purpose. Unfortunately, they like AT&T chose to convert their name from an acronym to a word by going all lowercase, so now their name is no longer “U.P.S.” but the word “ups.” Unlike some earlier respondents, I have no particular problem with 3D effects when suitable – trendy though they may be – and a shield is a simple place to use them. However, I agree the new graphic says less than the old one did, even if it says it more forcefully. Before we had a package and a shield – I guess they protected our shipments – but now we have a shield with a swoopy line on it – so now they’re just about protection. In short, the new UPS logo is much better but unfortunately better suited to a security company than a package delivery company. They could have redesigned the old logo to have all the strengths of the new one without losing their core identity.

Much better: FedEx, LDS. A little better: Intel, Kodak. Varying states of worse: AT&T, Burger King, Bank of New York, DC, Pizza Hut, Quark, Sprint, UPS.

Positioning is the issue…not updated logos. What will it take for “Brown” to recover the millions of dollars it spent on the next logo. Or any of the others.

I must admit, the art dorector that got Bank of NY to use this etch-a-scetch logo was brillant. Logo is absurd but the guts to present and sell it…wow.

Thanks, email me at endlessenigma@gmail.com

*snerk*

What does your husband think if churches that form a company called Intellectual Reserve Inc to act as copyright holder so that it can sue violators without the name of the church appearing in the lawsuit?

I had never seen the arrow cutout in the FedEx logo before. Of course it took me almost a year of seeing it to figure out the the Carrefour logo was a cutout “c” and not some sort of depiction of a cutting tool.

The new UPS one isn’t so bad, but it will look dated soon and will have to be updated more frequently.

The Bank of New York is horrible, but so was their old one. They should have stolen the design the Church used.

I’m guessing that the IBM logo will never change. Ever.

Rusty, you should have put Apple up there. I have a certain nostalgia for the rainbow logo.